


Valentine & Vimes: Welcome Home

by Aleaiactaest, Slyjinks



Series: Valentine & Vimes [2]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Canon typical ablest language, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholicism, Character Death, Crossover, Demonic semi-possession, Discworld series end spoilers, Drug reference, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mind Screw, Murder, Nuclear Weapons, Plot with small sprinklings of porn, Polyamory, Sexual content placed in its own separate labelled chapters so it can be skipped as needed, Smoking, Societal Biphobia, Societal Homophobia, Societal Transphobia, Violence, death the character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:27:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 211,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aleaiactaest/pseuds/Aleaiactaest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/pseuds/Slyjinks
Summary: When Sam Vimes was told the Commonwealth would “cease to be”, he insisted that the wizards save every person there, not just himself. As it turned out, the number of people who were actual people was far fewer than expected, but a handful still found themselves struggling with some uncomfortable facts: they were all fictional characters made real by another person’s realness, their entire lives a scripted backstory created by a few wizards, while the real world had magic and was flat.Raiders to barbarian “heroes”, ghouls to undead, atomic mutations to thaumic ones, there are a lot of surprising similarities between their new home and their old one. But it starts to seem like bits and pieces of the Commonwealth have followed them into the Ankh-Morpork...Meanwhile, Sam Vimes has to deal with learning that the wife he loves and the son he thought dead are both very much alive. As wonderful as that revelation is, he’s left with the question of what to do about his new boyfriend and the synth son they’d been raising together, even while he’s gripped with the dread certainty that no matter what happens, he’s going to get it wrong.
Relationships: Nick Valentine/Samuel Vimes, Salacia "Sally" von Humpeding/Piper Wright, Sybil Ramkin/Samuel Vimes
Series: Valentine & Vimes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076
Comments: 133
Kudos: 24





	1. Circle Time * Three Sams and a Sybil * Rampage

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a playlist available on Youtube:  
> <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_>

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story so far: At an Unseen University Soul Cake Tuesday party, goggles for a strange wizard game being run by Hex were pushed over Sam Vimes’s eyes. The first thing he saw was a convincing illusion of his wife murdered and his son kidnapped, and so the Summoning Dark in his soul dragged him physically into the game to give chase. Inside the game, Sam’s reality and his conviction in the reality of the characters around him led those characters to develop a reality of their own. Sam, believing Sybil to be dead, fell in love with his closest companion in the game, Nick Valentine who, being real, could love him in return. Since The wizards realized that Vimes could not be pulled out with the primary objective of the game unfinished, and would not be pulled out if anyone was left behind, but also worried that if he (or his increasingly aware Companions) began to realize their world wasn’t real, they would suffer a critical unreality failure. Eventually, the objectives were complete and the wizards had a way to give real minds real bodies, and so it was time to bring everyone home to Ankh-Morpork.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Some Things Never Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTY9JimeXuw&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=1) by Miracle Of Sound, [Fallout 4 Official Main Theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzvZE4BY0hY&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=2) by Inon Zur, [record scratch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqgW-2orQQg&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=3), and [We Can Rule You Wholesale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqCbOJc6RU&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=4), the Ankh-Morpork Anthem.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Circle Time * Three Sams and a Sybil * Rampage_

Standing in a white chalk circle were Commander Vimes, physically no worse for the wear, Nick Valentine, Preston Garvey, Deacon, Codsworth, Dogmeat, Piper Wright, Nat Wright, Strong and…

...DiMA and Old Longfellow, DiMA in the process of drawing a plasma gun on Longfellow, who already had a rifle trained on the synth. Nick Valentine ducked in between the two of them, and he did something that seemed to surprise even him: he grabbed their guns off them. DiMA backed out of the chalk circle and into a laboratory table, fear wide in his eyes, and he reached behind him, feeling on the table. Longfellow, denied his prey, growled.

Ponder cleared his throat and ahemed, “Er, Hex says it’s very important that I let you know that this was all just a simulation, and no one has actually killed any person in the process. He says it’s important that you all know that for heuristic integrity. The game physics were heavily simplified and abstracted. We… didn’t model in many... nonlethal solutions because test focus groups said they were ‘boring’, ‘sissy’, and ‘too limiting’. Which may be why coshing people gently on the head did not have the expected effects. And so on. Erm.”

He wasn’t a murderer? Vimes blinked. The Summoning Dark hissed, irritated, _But you would have been._

_No, I wouldn’t. He just said not killing wasn’t an option. If it was, I would have picked it every time._

“I said evacuate _every_ person!” Vimes shouted, looming up on Hex, glaring at the ram’s skull for lack of a better focus point.

“These are all the people,” said Ponder. “Everyone with sufficient Mind to transmogrify into a body. If you find any important organs missing, please contact an Igor; one of the pizzas was chocolate, and I’m concerned that might have thrown off the tabulation slightly. Most of the non-player characters were nowhere near personhood, thankfully, because a few more, and Hex wouldn’t have been able to run the simulation, and then you would have all suffered a Critical Unreality Failure, as we say.”

“No one says that, sir,” muttered a student wizard with a spotty face and a white hat and robes.

Piper blurted, “Where are we?”

Nat asked, “What’s happening?”

Garvey looked to Sam and inquired, “General?”

Deacon’s outfits switched. He said, “Oh, I know exactly where this is… it’s Sam-Tell-Me-What’s-Going-On-Right-Now-Ville.” A slight tone of panic entered his voice.

Dogmeat barked. Strong just remarked, “Huh. Puny humans with funny hats.”

Young Sam asked, “Why does that boy look like me?”

Realizing belatedly that he was standing on a slice of sardine and fig pizza, Vimes swivelled in place and looked where young Sam was looking, and there were, in addition to Ponder and a cadre of student wizards, Miss Cripslock, her notepad out, Otto beside her with his iconograph, Carrot, Angua in her blonde wolf form. Sally and Detritus, and…

...Sybil, very much alive, and young Sam, still seven years old.

DiMA grabbed something off the table behind him, which Vimes didn’t pay much attention to, because, with a cry of, “You’re alive!” he was busy running up to Sybil and throwing his arms around her and giving her one of those public kisses that didn’t come naturally to him that he had nonetheless worked himself around to be able to do because it was important to Sybil.

Nat looked at Detritus and asked, half-hiding behind Piper, “What’s with the rock man?”

“Young lady, in this great multi-ethnic city, we do not use the r-work to refer to the proud and diverse borosilicate people known as ‘trolls’,” Carrot corrected gently.

“At least, not more dan once,” said Detritus.

“Er, you have to understand, from Commander Vimes’s perspective, he’s been gone for months, over a short year, really,” Ponder started, and Miss Cripslock took notes and Otto took an iconograph, but whatever DiMA was doing distracted Ponder, and he shouted in the sort of tone usually reserved for particularly reckless students who were soon to be silhouettes on the wall, “You put that down this instant!”

Otto went to ash with the flash of his iconograph, his emergency vial of blood hit the dust, and he re-materialized and busied himself again with his photographic equipment. Sally had duked into the shade cast by Detritus just in time to avoid a similar fate.

Everyone from the Commonwealth who wasn’t otherwise preoccupied or a dog was spooked by what had happened, and Otto asked, “Vot, never seen a vampire before?”

“Like a ghoul?” Garvey stammered.

“No, exactly not, really, first ze r-word and zen zat? Really, you all need a sensitivity class,” Otto sniffed.

Sybil held Vimes rather tightly, as if to verify that he was real, and she asked, “Dear, who is the boy who looks so like our young Sam, only a little older?”

Sybil was alive! Vimes’s heart exulted, swelling like a patched balloon that could finally hold its air again. She hadn’t been dragged into the game with him! She hadn’t died! Young Sam was there, with her. He hadn’t grown old and grown into a cancer. He was still a boy. Sam hadn’t murdered him. So…

Oh.

Vimes stared up at the ceiling, which appeared to be splattered with yao guai chunks. “He’s young Sam.”

“That’s going to be confusing, dear,” Sybil said mildly. “You know, I had a great uncle Shaun, he’s got a bit of that look…”

Longfellow, denied his revenge on DiMA - was there even a revenge to be had there, if no one had actually killed anyone? Didn’t that just make DiMA a shifty bugger with some unfortunate instincts? - said in his half-drunk singsong, “Here's to wives an' sweethearts, may they never meet!”

Vimes looked over at Valentine, who was still standing in between Longfellow and DiMA, who was being scolded by Ponder, who had wrested a thin baton out of DiMA’s left hand. Vimes’s heart broke again. Sybil was going to kill him or, worse, leave him. At least if she killed him, Vimes was sure that Carrot and everyone who mattered would agree that cheating on Lady Sybil Vimes _née_ Ramkin, Non Svmet Nvllvs Pro Responso1, was Suicide. He couldn’t bear her leaving him. Vimes was going to have to tell her everything and soon and throw himself upon her mercy.

So Valentine was going to leave him. Vimes wanted to weep. Valentine was fundamentally Good in a way that Vimes didn’t quite understand but nonetheless respected, because Valentine somehow managed to be Good and not stupid at the same time. Vimes could count the number of people he knew who could successfully pull that off on one hand. Carrot, who was there in the room, came to mind.

A Good man… golem… whatever wouldn’t court a married man. 

Valentine was going to leave him.

Vimes didn’t think he could handle that. He resolved to avoid the matter, sagging against Sybil. He said weakly, “Everyone, we were all trapped in a silly game of b...” there were two young Sams here, possibly one young Shaun to be, “... a silly game, anyway. Because of wizards.” He glared at Ponder and his students, and he glared especially at Hex. “I’m Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and this is Captain Carrot.” He gestured vaguely.

“You really are a cop? Bogus,” said Deacon, scuffing his shoe on the chalk circle on the floor.

“We were in a game? Was this the Institute’s idea of fun?” asked Piper.

“Yes and no. There is no Institute. You are, loosely speaking, extremely loosely speaking - I’m serious, Xian, if you use this kind of language on your next exam, I’m throwing it down a stairwell - fictional characters who were made real by Commander Vimes’s reality field at least in part because his morphic field was desperately lonely,” said Ponder, who had finally gotten the wooden stick away from DiMA, who was sulking.

Strong corrected, “Strong is super mutant.”

“Uh, General?” asked Garvey, uncertainly.

Codsworth said, “Oh dear, that’s dehydrated talk, that is,” and he handed Ponder a glass of water.

“Whatever the wizard says is probably daft but generally correct,” Sam granted. “Captain Carrot, could you please tell my… Companions a bit more about Ankh-Morpork and see that they are _safely_ settled in? You can use one of my accounts. I need to talk to Sybil.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Carrot.

“Uhm, actually… I need to detain… which one is he?” Ponder asked of one of his students, evidently not the Xian one, instead, an Ephebian looking one.

“DiMA?” said the Ephebian student wizard, whose staff smelled faintly of sour grapes.

“DiMA! Yes. He needs to stay here a bit,” said Ponder, glaring at the cup of water in his hand before he realized that he was glaring at the wrong thing and switched to glaring at the stick in his other hand.

Vimes thought a quick moment. DiMA hadn’t murdered anyone, so Vimes didn’t have to send him to Mr. Trooper. Moreover, if Vimes sent DiMA to Mr. Trooper, DiMA might meet the Patrician, and Vimes really didn’t want DiMA to meet the Patrician. In fact, DiMA staying in the Unseen University, to Vimes’s mental math, would seem to rather lower his chances of meeting the Patrician. “Sounds fine by me. I’ll be sure to check on him, of course.” He made it sound like a threat towards everyone involved, which it was.

DiMA’s posture sort of curled in on himself as he looked at the mint green walls and the laboratory equipment and the student wizards in white robes.

Valentine offered, “Hey, Sam’s not going to leave you in a bad place.”

“And if I do not wish to stay?” DiMA asked softly.

“Why wouldn’t you want to? We’ve got the best mainframe on the Disc here,” said a different student wizard, one who looked Klatchian. He had a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard.

“If you wander off the University grounds, then something might happen to you, like a 50 foot tall woman falling on you and turning into a writhing mass of tentacles,” said Ponder wearily and as if from personal experience.

“Cor,” said old Longfellow.

1 She Won't Take 'No' For An Answer

* * *

Confusion and shouting continued. There were more iconographs from terrible angles. Vimes didn’t want to let go of Sybil, and he couldn’t look at Valentine. Both young Sams limpeted to Vimes. Sybil mentioned that she had their carriage ready and that they could all go to Scoone Avenue to sort out matters, which Vimes muttered, glumly, was likely advisable.

Piper was getting chummy with Miss Cripslock.

Carrot took the Institute pistol and the rifle away from Nick and broke both of them, which was satisfying to watch. Carrot wouldn’t steer his Companions wrong, so Vimes would go to Scoone Avenue and… it dawned on him, looking at Garvey, that there was something he should probably warn them about, which Carrot wouldn’t think of. 

So he commanded his Companions off to a study room, because the wizards didn’t use them, anyway. There was a blackboard. Something about it made Vimes’s eyes water, as if some bits of it were blacker than others. DiMA looked at the blackboard thoughtfully. Dogmeat barked. Why had he brought Dogmeat? The room was cramped enough as it was, with Strong blocking the exit and then Codsworth hovering over the table. Grimacing, Vimes shut the door.

Old Longfellow threw himself into a chair in a huff, glared daggers at DiMA, pulled out a bottle, and started to down it.

“So you didn’t warn us, why?” Deacon asked, sitting down on the table himself.

“Well, Deacon, I _did_ , and you didn’t believe me, so I ranked my chances at being able to convince any of you as between slim and none, and in any case, I didn’t really know what was going on myself. I had an inkling, after the Institute was destroyed, but… I thought more of you were real, but I guess I was supposed to think it was real, because if I didn’t think it was real and realized that I didn’t have a body, I might have imploded or something? I don’t know. It’s magic. You can’t explain it. That’s the problem with it,” Vimes complained.

“Can’t you…” DiMA muttered, speculatively, eyeing a black piece of chalk.

“You should have tried!” Piper argued.

“Fine. Piper Wright, you’re a fictional person out of an icono-game made by wizards,” Vimes said flatly.

“You can’t mean that. This is… this is… _silly_. That computer had skulls on it! And ants. None of this would even work!” Piper protested.

“My case in point. Now, what I wanted to warn you about is that people here aren’t…” Vimes stared up at the ceiling, trying to think how he wanted to phrase this. “Uhm, look, if you’re a man who enjoys the company of other men, you want to be very good at running, or else you’re never going to run again. And Nick? Gods, I’m so sorry. I never meant to do this to you, you understand? I know you’re a good… golem detective. You would never court a married man. I really thought Sybil was dead, we both saw her… her… body, oh gods, and I’m so glad that she’s alive, and I’m just… I’m sorry. That’s all I am. Sorry.”

“Actually, Sam, I-” Valentine started, looking rather downcast.

“General?” Garvey asked, frowning.

Piper interrupted, “Wait, what about ladies who like the ladies?”

Vimes blinked. He hadn’t realized that about Piper. Vimes supposed, if he liked multiple flavours and Nick liked multiple flavours that Piper was also entitled to do so. Gods, Piper liking women had to be better than her fancying middle-aged policemen. “Uhm, I can get you the address of a discreet shop that definitely does not sell blackjacks, especially if you don’t ask under the table.”

“...gals who want to be more than pals need those?” Piper asked, twiddling her fingers together

“Maybe also a good crossbow, Burleigh & Stronginthearm for preference, I - I wouldn’t know much about that, perhaps I should have Sally talk with you?” Vimes speculated. People got grumpy about ladies of the lavender sort, and certain men got especially grumpy that ladies of the lavender sort weren’t making them a sandwich, which was a nasty business. Better forewarned and forearmed.

“So your statement on violence against women is that women ought to buy crossbows, is that it, _Commander_?” Piper asked, pulling out her notebook.

DiMA was hesitantly fiddling with the black chalk, which made a terrible screech on the board, but he asked, guilelessly, “So… _Commander_ , why haven’t you done anything about it?”

Vimes had wanted to warn Valentine and Garvey, and as it turned out, Piper also needed to be warned, but it dawned upon Vimes with horrible clarity that DiMA also needed to be warned. Not about what might happen to him, but because of what he might be inclined to do if anything happened to him. Yes, indeed, Stibbons could keep DiMA in the Unseen University for as long as he wanted.

Vimes admitted, “...because I should have thought about it sooner.” He’d avoided thinking about it. It had been a rough time, growing up and realizing that no, the other lads around him, when they paged through the _Amorous Adventures of Molly Clapper_2, weren’t also just as disappointed as he was that the engravings only gave a good eyeful of the titular (and _tit_ ular) Molly Clapper and mostly omitted her swains. Thinking might have led to doing, and doing might have led to being done in.

“Doll, could we try talking with -” Valentine tried again, trembling slightly.

“I never wanted to ruin your reputation or put you in danger, I swear to you,” Vimes said quickly, sagging.

“People might hurt Dad?” the Commonwealth young Sam asked, eyes wide and fearful.

“I expect they probably will,” Vimes said darkly. After all, he just did. He hadn’t wanted to, but he had. “Golems have a hard enough time of it as it is with the pottery smashers -”

“Pottery smashers?” Deacon asked.

“Why smash bad? Smash good,” Strong grumped.

“Not this kind of smash. They’re the hooligans who throw up graffiti of ‘Crakc potz!’ on any flat surface and go ‘round smashing up the windows on the Golem Trust and sometimes murder golems when they can get away with it,” Vimes answered, frowning. “No, I certainly don’t need to add a bad reputation _and_ the attention of violent bigots. Gods, I’m so sorry… it’s… it’s probably safer for Nick if we don’t talk about… this.”

“What, and hide the truth?” Piper demanded, incredulous.

“Uhm, sweetheart, I don’t really -” Nick pleaded.

“Yes, yes, I know you never would have gotten into a mess like this if you’d been in possession of all the facts,” Vimes said miserably, “and I will, of course, tell Sybil, my wife, everything and beg her forgiveness, although I don’t deserve it, but Piper, I swear to… I swear on my badge, that if Nick gets hurt because of something you say, write, clacks, or otherwise convey, that I shall write you a glowing letter of recommendation to William de Worde, chief editor of the Times, and if you understand the relationship between the Watch and the press -”

Piper looked scandalized, “You wouldn’t!”

“I’d do anything to keep him safe!” Vimes snapped.

“I don’t need -” Nick said numbly.

“So I can’t talk about Dad?” young Sam asked forlornly.

“Cool, I’m down with having blackmail on the Commander of the Watch,” Deacon said, not quite deadpanning.

Vimes glared at him.

“General, uhm… you are going to fix this, aren’t you?” Garvey asked seriously.

What made Garvey think that Vimes could?

Vimes laughed manically, “And while I’m at it, make the upper crust pay their taxes?”

“I mean, if they’re not doing it…” Garvey started.

“Yes, I’ll just go give the whole city a kick in the a… erm,” Vimes caught himself, thinking about young Sam and Nat.

Strong pointed out, “Human too small to kick city,” as if that was the only flaw in an otherwise excellent plan.

Vimes thought about the goblins, although truth be told, that was mainly down to Sybil understanding just how far music appreciation could carry. He sobered and promised, “I’ll do something.”

2 Roundworld lacks this particular series, but [Moll Flanders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moll_Flanders) appears comparable.

* * *

While chaos unfolded like a rose exploding in slow motion, the blonde ’wolfhound’ sidled up to Dogmeat and barked a friendly greeting. Dogmeat smelled much like any dog who regularly ran into dangerous situations, often involving gunpowder and, as a result, was beloved of and petted by many. Angua thought it was fascinating that Hex had gotten what seemed to be correct scents for everyone. As Dogmeat barked back, amiable enough, something along the lines of, “Hi hi, I’m Dogmeat, I know what that means, yes, I know, the joke’s not on me,” Angua sniffed everyone else.

Commander Vimes had his characteristic, commanding navy aroma. Under that, there was an odd scent like a mixture of cigarettes, something artificial she couldn’t place, cold steel, and a coppery tang, and there was also the scent of the boy of about ten, the one who looked like a slightly older version of his son.

Sniffing about his Companions, Angua quickly placed the odd scent that was underlaying Vimes’s own scent; the unalive one called Nick Valentine smelled of whiskey and cigarettes, which golems never smelled of, and that peculiar artificial smell like sonkies, the blood-sharp scent of metal, and most interestingly of all, he smelled of Commander Vimes and the Vimes boy.

Angua tilted her head and made a querulous noise, not quite believing her nose, even though it never lied. Dogmeat bounded over and said, “They are all mine; they are my humans! Even the ones who aren’t humans, they are also mine.” He wagged proudly over having so many humans and nonhumans as _his_. “That one is Nick Valentine, he is a machine who finds things, you know, like a working dog. He is Sam’s mate.”

So her nose hadn’t stuttered. Gone for months from his perspective, indeed, and there was old Commander Vimes, who sometimes had trouble figuring out how Angua and Carrot got by as a mixed species couple, cozying up to a bloody unalive wind-up toy. Of course, he’d gone right back to Lady Sybil the moment he saw her, but Angua didn’t know what to think of it, and the wolf form wasn’t good for thinking.

Dogmeat then introduced, “And this one is their puppy, he is also Sam,” pointing up at the boy of tenish who looked like a slightly older young Sam.

The boy had Vimes’s scent on him and that Valentine’s scent, enough so that, if they’d both been humans of different genders or at least a compatible mix of human and nonhuman that Angua would have been willing to accept that they were his parents. He also smelled oddly clean, almost antiseptic. He was particularly upset.

Two young Sams, of slightly different ages.

Dogmeat cocked his head over at the younger of the two young Sams and barked a question, and Angua answered, “Also young Sam.”

Dogmeat shook his head and kept shaking until he shook himself right out and said, “Two young Sams? Silly! Humans aren’t good at naming, are they? Everyone’s ‘Mutt’ if they’re not ‘Rover’... this one is Preston Garvey, he does a lot of running when people need help and then he shoots bad things and they go away, this one is Piper Wright, she yaps a lot and then gets in places and makes people angry. They wanted to mate with Sam, but he wasn’t interested…”

Angua could smell that. She had to wonder what the blazes had been going on that otherwise healthy twenty-somethings had gotten it into their heads that old Mister Vimes was desirable.

“This puppy is Nat Wright, she is from another litter than Piper Wright,” Dogmeat explained of the sullen little girl, who looked just a little older than the new young Sam, “and then there is Codsworth, hi Codsworth, he is a machine, and sometimes, he has water if you’re thirsty.”

He wagged up at Codsworth speculatively, and the flying squid golem produced what seemed to be a glass of clear water from nowhere and set it down on the floor for Dogmeat, who wolfed the water down.

“Deacon looks like lots of humans, but he’s just one, and his smell is the same,” advised Dogmeat. 

Of the big orc-thing, who smelled like sweat and raw meat, Dogmeat said, “That’s Strong. Strong is a super mutant. He doesn’t eat humans anymore so Sam lets him come along.”

That sounded like something Mister Vimes would do.

Of the old man who smelled like the sea and the forest and liquor and the blood of the hunt, Dogmeat admitted, “Don’t know him. He’s angry…”

Then there was the brittle unalive that the old man had drawn upon, with a weapon that was already confiscated, who had the same artificial scent as Valentine but also smelled of beach-glass and the aroma after lightning had struck and fog and old, rusted blood, blood like guilt, thick and dripping. Dogmeat also confessed, “Don’t know him. Nick Valentine has a littermate?” He sniffed at the unalive’s ankle with idle interest and then darted away.

The High Energy Magic building all smelled like octarine, but for a moment, the ozone scent intensified.

Angua padded after Dogmeat and said, “Thank you, Dogmeat. This has been very… helpful.”

Dogmeat hopped up on one of the desk-surfaces of Hex to smell one of the ram skulls, and he made a little noncommittal body language gesture as if to say ‘it was nothing’, and then he looked right over at Carrot and asked, “So why are you mates with a human? Isn’t that a bit odd?”

Angua choked. Oh dear. How to explain werewolves to a dog who seemed to be very clever but ultimately just a dog?

* * *

In the end, Vimes and Sybil were both parents, and Vimes, for his part, was a father who was permanently in terror of the idea that he was doing it wrong, as that icono-game had richly re-proved to him. So young Sam, both of them, had to come first, for all that Vimes needed to confess to Sybil and for all that he hated how he’d hurt Nick.

It started as they departed the chaotic throng. The Commonwealth young Sam was limpeted to Vimes, and the Ankh-Morpork young Sam was limpeted between Vimes and Sybil. The Commonwealth one looked sadly back at Valentine, as Vimes walked their boy away, Valentine’s expression encapsulating the desolation present at the site of a nuclear detonation. Vimes explained more explicitly to the older boy, “Sybil is my wife.”

“I thought Mom was dead…” said the Commonwealth boy.

“Dead? Why would Mum be dead?” asked the Ankh-Morpork boy anxiously, looking up at Sybil, as if being clamped to her side was not proof enough that she existed.

“Because wizards have a peculiar idea of fun,” Vimes said darkly. Wizards were all celibate and unmarried. They had no idea what it was, to lose a wife. The buggers probably thought it was a right lark.

At the carriage, his Commonwealth child goggled at the horse, exclaiming, “That’s a real horse! And it’s not mutated at all!”

“It’s not all that. Trains are faster and more powerful,” corrected his Ankh-Morpork boy, rightfully suspicious of his older copy.

They settled into the coach. Vimes preferred walking. He was a natural pedestrian, and Ankh-Morpork traffic was horrible. Sybil kissed him and leaned her forehead against him.

“Gross,” said the apparently younger of the two young Sams, while the other one stared out the window, amazed. “Look at how tall that tower is! It’s like a skyscraper!”

“It’s going to fall over in a stiff breeze one day, it is,” said the younger.

“I’m terribly glad you’re back safe, dear,” said Sybil, patting his arm.

“And I’m glad you’re alive. I… I have a lot to tell you,” said Vimes, staring at the coach floor.

“So. Young Sam,” Sybil prompted.

“He’s… the same as young Sam, by blood. I think he’s about 10, mentally,” Vimes started, despairing over how to explain any of it.

“Ah. Then he’s ours,” Sybil said.

“You could say that. I know that we agreed on only the one but... I’ll get more into how he was made later. I’d rather not in front of him,” said Vimes.

The older young Sam pulled back from the window and ducked against Vimes and whimpered, “Father, someone just stabbed someone out there!”

Vimes looked out the window, saw the popinjay in raven’s wing black, who was clutching his bleeding flank, and he said, “Ah, an Assassin. No, stabbing them’s basically fine. Self-defense, you know.”

Sybil suggested to the older boy, “What would you say to being Shaun? Having two young Sams will be awfully confusing.”

His lips trembled, and he pouted, “Why do I have to change my name? I’m older.”

“And I imagine you’re very responsible,” Sybil prompted gently.

The older boy blinked, confused.

“So you’ll understand that it would be very confusing for your younger brother to have to adapt to a new name, young as he is,” Sybil continued.

“I could do it!” the youngest Sam said defiantly.

The middle Sam blinked again, realized that he was being challenged, and said quickly, “No, I can be a Shaun.”

“I can Shaun harder than you,” said young Sam, sticking out his tongue.

“No, _I_ ’m Shaun. M...Mom says _I_ look like her great uncle,” said Shaun, crossing his arms.

“You look like me!” argued young Sam.

“But I’m older. And I bet great uncle Shaun’s really old. So I look more than him. Ten’s a lot older than… seven?” Shaun said, smug in his triumph.

“That’s only three years!” said young Sam, climbing over Vimes to scoot next to his new brother.

Shaun proceeded to goggle over things that Vimes thought of as perfectly normal in Ankh-Morpork, which were nonetheless novel to Shaun, such as the troll lorries and the gargoyles that would occasionally deliver very, very slow salutes as the Vimes family carriage rolled by and the clacks towers… young Sam took the opportunity to lecture Shaun on how none of this was a big deal at all.

Meanwhile, Sybil prompted, folding one of her hands over Vimes’s. “So.”

“Ye-es. Quite a bit to tell you. Just. Not in front of them,” Vimes said, gloomily.

“Could you tell me more about your,” Sybil hesitated, “friends?”

Vimes didn’t have many friends. Sybil knew. “Uhm, I suppose, first, there’s Codsworth. He’s the floating squid golem. He’s a butler. I daresay that he’ll still want to work for me? He’ll defer to Willikins in the hierarchy. I don’t think there’ll be trouble.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea, dear. We could use the extra help, with having two boys now,” Sybil agreed. “That metal, though… the dragons might try to eat him. How high can he fly? He might be of help when some of the sillies get stuck on the roof or up in trees…”

“I’m honestly not sure. I’ve never seen him hover up particularly high,” said Vimes. “No one even knew how to jump or climb, aside from the people who became real…”

“Dragons?” asked Shaun.

“Oh yes, dear. I breed swamp dragons,” Sybil said, smiling. Shaun clearly looked interested, and she went on about them at length, young Sam yawning at a few points. He’d heard it all before.

Eventually, though, the topic circled back to Sam’s Companions, and so Vimes ventured, “Dogmeat’s a dog? He’s a good dog. Helped me track down Conrad Kellogg, the mercenary who...” Vimes stared blankly at the other wall of the coach.

“Dear?” Sybil prompted gently.

His throat felt dry. The words stuck like fishbones. He said hoarsely, “I watched him kill you.”

Her hand tightened on his. “I’m here. I’m fine.”

She was. He wasn’t. 

Both young Sam and Shaun looked intently out the window while they were stuck in traffic, their faces twisting. Vimes tried to make out what they were looking at. Shaun said slowly, “So that man there, his… arteries all just came out… in a straight line?”

Young Sam looked at his father expectantly for an explanation. Vimes stared at it. There was an officer on the scene, who did note the Vimes family carriage and shot him a brief, sloppy salute. He sank back into the seat of the carriage and said, “Stray magic surge. You know, like last yea- er, month, when Mort Lake started talking to the swimmers and asking them to leave. We’ll investigate it, of course, but wizards don’t kill people with magic, these days, and if we found that a wizard had, then the Councils of Wizards would get involved, and it’d be out of our hands.”

“You keep talking about magic like it’s real. Everyone here does,” said Shaun, questioningly.

“Well, of course it is,” said Sybil.

Shaun looked at Vimes, like he was sure someone was trying to pull one over him. Vimes sighed and admitted, “Magic is real.”

“And I got to see magicians on the _Wonderful Fanny_ when we went on vacation,” said young Sam.

Vimes choked a bit. _Francesca_ , he wanted to say. A strangled sound escaped him.

Sybil thumped him on the back. Vimes sputtered and said weakly, “Where was I? Oh, yes… Miss Piper Wright is raising her younger sister, Miss Nat Wright. Miss Piper is a reporter. Nat helped maintain their press.”

“She’s, er… Her legs. You can see them,” Sybil said diplomatically.

“No, you can’t, ‘cos she’s got pants on,” Vimes said mulishly.

“You can see that she has legs, though,” said Sybil.

“I suppose we’ll live,” said Vimes. “Preston Garvey is a Minuteman, which is a sort of soldier that runs around actually helping people, rather than setting their cottages on fire. He thinks I’m his General.”

Sybil looked at him.

“No, I didn’t tell him I’m a Duke - which means Commander, anyway,” Vimes said hottly.

“Father’s a duke?” asked Shaun.

“I didn’t mean to be,” Sam said gloomily.

“A fine one,” said Sybil proudly.

“Mom’s a duchess?” Shaun concluded.

“Oh yes. No one can out-dutch her,” said Vimes, leaning forward and covering his head with his hands. Sybil was the duch-est. It was a useful skill, which Sybil only used as necessary. “Then there’s… hm. Old Longfellow. Hunter and island guide. Has a boozing problem. I should probably let him know about the blue ribboners.”

Offler’s League of Temperance provided assistance to those who wanted to swear off alcohol. There were a number of other groups like that in town.

“Strong is a super mutant. I think they’re sort of like very dim orcs. He wants to find the Milk of Human Kindness. Might send him around Ronnie Soak’s dairy? Mr. Soak has just about everything, so if it’s anywhere, it’ll be there,” Vimes speculated.

“That over there is Hen and Chickens Field, we used to have executions here long before I was born, but we don’t anymore,” pointed out young Sam. “We still have them, mind you, just not there. Mum and Father won’t let me go because of Hygiene.”

“Deacon is a spy,” Vimes said bluntly.

“You mean he’s a diplomat, dear?” Sybil said mildly.

“If you like,” Vimes grunted.

“And the last two?” Sybil prompted.

Vimes froze. Sybil waited. Shaun pointed out someone who looked half-human, half horse, and young Sam said, “Oh yeah, she’s a centaur, Father’s got one in the Watch now. She’s from the Ramtops.”

“Uhm. You have… very different centaurs,” Shaun said, reserved. “I think these ones are better?”

“Of course, she’s an Ankh-Morpork centaur now,” young Sam said proudly.

Vimes let the discussion of centaurs take the centre of attention. Young Sam was fascinated.

Then they were at Scoone Avenue, and Sybil wanted to give Shaun a quick lesson on safe interactions with swamp dragons. Vimes watched as she did, young Sam often piping up. Sybil would nod with satisfaction at young Sam’s additions. Vimes slunk off to Willikins and briefly explained that they now had a ten year old, if Willikins could inform the rest of the staff and possibly set up another bed for him in young Sam’s room. He also mentioned that Willikins ought to expect a floating squid golem and to hire him at the expected rate.

Willikins didn’t blink.

It wasn’t that they didn’t have spare rooms. They had more spare rooms than Vimes knew what to do with. It was that Shaun was a clingy, traumatized, lonely boy with abandonment issues and that Vimes thought that spending some time with his younger brother would do him good. They could annoy each other into the wee hours of the night. That was what siblings did, wasn’t it? Vimes wouldn’t know. If his mother had other children, they never made it to the stage where naming them was worthwhile.

* * *

After their statements were duly taken by Miss Cripslock and iconographed by Otto, the assorted gaggle of Commonwealthers stepped out of the High Energy Magic building, with its heavy, magic doors, and into what they did not yet know was uncommonly harsh sunlight for normally smoggy, shrouded Ankh-Morpork. It was the one clear, bright day of Autumn, before the freezing fogs would come. They blinked, and those who had hands held up their hands over their eyes or optical sensors, staggering slightly as the slow, honey-light of the Discworld pelted them.

DiMA looked back at Ponder, who stood behind him and who hadn’t at all stopped him from walking out the door with the rest. DiMA looked out over Ankh-Morpork and said, squinting, “Hmm. This is mildly unpleasant,” and he went back inside with Ponder. The heavy door closed behind him with a thud.

Old Longfellow groaned at the sunlight and muttered, “Too damn dry for it to be this bright.”

Sally already had an umbrella out. "I'll head back to the yard and get started on the reports, Captain," she told Carrot.

"Wait, so... vampires can go out in the sun?" Piper asked, intrigued. Then she remembered some of the interactions from earlier. "Uh, I'm sorry if that was inappropriate-"

Sally waved a hand and gave Piper a grin that, had it happened before they'd come outside, would have been the brightest thing in the area. "You're fine. And it varies. Vampires follow different rules depending on where they come from, but in my case, it's because I'm a black ribboner." She tapped a black ribbon that was tied to one of the clasps of her cape. "When a vampire gives up the, erm, red stuff, we lose some of our power, but a lot of the weaknesses aren't as bad, either." She glanced up towards her umbrella. "Usually I can get by just fine with a broad-brimmed hat and long sleeves, but the sun's brighter than usual today."

"Oh, okay!" Piper replied as she took Sally's words in. Some of the terms were new, but there was enough context there to sort it out. So 'black-ribboners' were vampires who didn't drink blood? "Thanks for explaining."

"Not a problem," Sally answered and started to walk off, but then Piper spoke up again.

"One more thing, uhm... Sally, right? Blu- I mean, Commander Vimes said there were..." she looked around a moment, then continued, "certain things about living in Ankh-Morpork that you might be able to help me figure out. Is there a way I can get in touch with you later?"

Sally grinned again. "If you come by the Watch Headquarters at Pseudopolis Yard, they can get me a message even if I'm not there. If that doesn't work, just ask this guy," she pointed a thumb towards Carrot, "to let me know where he's set you guys up, although that might work out more easily if you invite me yourself." Sally gave an easy-to-miss wink, then a quick wave to the rest, keeping her hand beneath the umbrella as she waved, and left the group.

Captain Carrot, a tall, broad, well-built, immaculately uniformed man, who had a sort of infectious enthusiasm about him, coughed slightly to get everyone's attention. It was time to get this tour started. “Right, so this… thing… we have here is the Great Big Thing! Cost the Unseen University millions. I hear it’s proving many theories wrong, producing results that absolutely no one understands, and upsetting many wizards, so I suppose that was money well spent.” He gestured at a sort of floating rune-thing in the air, which was apparently the Great Big Thing.

“It not that big,” said Strong.

“Over there, you can see the Tower of Art, it’s the tallest structure in Ankh-Morpork,” continued Carrot, who might have missed his calling as a tour guide. He seemed to know the entire city and its history blind-folded, with half his brain tied behind his back. More importantly, the entire city seemed to know Carrot and seemed to be relatively uninclined to cause him any grief.

Just on the way to the Legation off the Low King and the Troll Embassy, because Captain Carrot seemed to feel that the Commonwealthers ought to know where those were, Valentine noticed a dozen thefts. He pointed the first out to Carrot, who politely explained that Ankh-Morpork had a legal Thieves’ Guild, who were allowed to engage in a certain amount of thieving, and that he recognized that particular thief as a Guild Member in good standing. Valentine got the impression that Carrot didn’t particularly like the Thieves’ Guild but was in no position to do anything about it and was frustrated by this fact.

But no one tried to touch any of the Companions with Carrot. People recognized him and responded generally favourably.

That was just as well, Valentine thought. He didn’t want to find out what happened if someone tried to pickpocket Strong. Vimes clearly knew his officers and had picked the right man for the job for leading a gang of the out-of-towniest out-of-towners there could be.

Ankh-Morpork was a sprawling, byzantine metropolis of sights and smells and screams that appeared to be attempting to pack more people into it than Boston ever had. There were humans of every colour and dwarfs of every colour and trolls of many different mineral types, including some who looked like brick or cinder blocks or cobblestones. In addition, the gargoyles were living beings, and they seemed to all know Carrot. Occasional ceramic people wandered around, all industriously at work.

These were the golems that Vimes seemed to think Valentine was a fancy example of. Perhaps the glowing eyes were close?

Smaller than the dwarfs, some green people with a peculiar odor scuttled about; they were the goblins. Smaller than them were gnomes, who seemed to mostly run shoe stores, as Carrot paused to point out a particularly good boot-manufacturer. Nat was all agog.

It was, they were informed, entirely the wrong weather and time of day for vampires, but they saw a few zombies, which were not the same thing as ghouls, they were informed. The entities that appeared to be sapient mounds of compost and smelled like it, too, were gnolls.

That wasn’t the half of it. Everyone wanted to sell them something, and Ankh-Morpork did a mixture of coins, paper money, and stamps. The Companions had none of those things. They did feel oddly hypnotized by a little man with a sausage cart who was hawking sausage in a bun. Every Companion who could eat went in for one, and Strong had two, which Carrot paid for, from one of Vimes’s accounts…

...one of Vimes’s accounts? Valentine had the sinking suspicion that Vimes was rich. It was how his wife dressed, compared to all the women he saw out in the streets now, and how she carried herself and how the Vimes family had a carriage with a good horse and what looked suspiciously like a family crest on the door. Vimes had never acted rich around Valentine, and he had a number of good rants about tight-fisted misers, but Valentine couldn’t ignore the evidence in front of his optics.

Come to think of it, Vimes didn’t seem to think anything of suggesting to Piper that she ought to buy a blackjack and crossbow. Piper. With no money. Rich people forgot that the poor didn’t have the luxury of buying their way out of problems...

Valentine was trying not to think about Vimes, but it was difficult. Ankh-Morpork was his city, and so many of Vimes’s seemingly batshit insane comments back in the Commonwealth were now making perfect sense.

Goddamn Sam Vimes, insisting that he’d do anything to keep Nick Valentine safe and not even letting him get a word in edgewise...

Goddamn Sam Vimes, going off with his nicely dressed wife in his carriage with his son and _their_ son.

Goddamn Sam Vimes.

Valentine wanted to rage at the world and to weep. He was a fictional character, the machine ghost of a dead man who’d never lived, and his lover had taken their child and gone and dumped him in a city that was bewildering in its diversity, as Klatchian curry carts butted up against Agatean stir fry shops and a Llamedosian druid tried to peddle laptop stone circles for all your astronomical calculation needs, and the Commonwealth wasn’t even a real place, and here, in the swirl of all this ridiculous colour and scent and sound, here, his lover had left him.

They made it as far as the dwarf Bread Museum when Valentine realized that Old Longfellow was missing.

At the corner of Rime Street and Easy Street, not far from the museum, there was a tavern called the Bunch of Grapes, and not far down Easy Street, there was another public house, and Valentine rushed in to check the closer of the two, only to be met with glares from both the publican and clientele. It felt like how Myrna treated him. Valentine backed up into Carrot, and when the publican saw Carrot, he asked, “It’ll be a milk, then, guv?”

Carrot shook his head to the publican and admitted to Valentine, “You know, the Bunch of Grapes is where I first met Commander Vimes…”

Valentine completed a quick scan of the crowd and said, “Longfellow’s not here,” and turned to head out to examine the next bar.

Before he could, Carrot stopped him and said gently, “You might not want to go in there?”

“Why’s that?” Valentine snapped, not feeling at his best, all things considered.

“These are human taverns,” Carrot said.

“What, I gotta go find a... a... golem bar?” Valentine said. “Not that I want a drink at the moment, I just want to make sure that Longfellow doesn’t get his fool head cut off.”

Valentine had seen an assault on the way to the museum. Two evil little ladies were slowly clubbing a man to death with a handbag and an umbrella. Carrot explained circumspectly that they were the Agony Aunts, Dotsie and Sadie, and that whatever he’d done, he’d assuredly had it coming. There were too many things like that where a man could just blunder in. Valentine worried for Longfellow. He might try to hunt a harpy and find himself hunted back.

Carrot shook his head. “There aren’t any bars that serve golems.” He looked up at one of the semaphore towers and pulled out a set of long white paddles.

“No?” Valentine had spent some time trying to make sense of the semaphore or clacks, as the locals called it, because it was something computational that got his mind off Vimes. Eight shutters, sometimes sixteen on what looked to be the higher traffic towers, articulated arms, a few different colours of light…

“Golems don’t drink,” said Carrot, sending off a message which was apparently then being relayed around town.

“That a description of Longfellow, that you sent off?” Valentine asked.

Carrot narrowed his eyes at Valentine. He seemed to be a fundamentally honest sort of person, and he said, “Yes.”

Okay, that gave him an idea about the amount of data content that Carrot had encapsulated into the gestures with the white paddles…

“Back to the museum with you, Mr. Valentine. I’ll check that next tavern,” said Carrot.

Piper, though, had come to see if they’d found where Longfellow had gone, with Nat dragging sullenly behind Piper, and then Preston came out to make sure they were safe.

Then Codsworth came out, wailing, “Ohh, someone come quick! Strong is… is… _eating_ the bread!”

* * *

Mrs. Goodbody, the proprietress of an unusual arts and crafts shop at Number 8, Easy Street, was doing a brisk business in her discreet leather and ring creations, because some odd barbarian had walked into the Bunch of Grapes, drank all the Bearhugger’s, and fought his way out. That was why there was such an uptick in her sales. People wanted to feel safe, and people felt much safer with a Mrs. Goodbody. 

“Now,” Mrs. Goodbody told Corporal Reg Shoe, who was taking witness statements, “I last saw that roaringly drunk man staggering off down towards Gleam Street.”

Shortly after Reg left, a young lady in a scandalous pair of pants, which conveyed the general concept that she possessed legs, came in with a sulking young girl dragging behind her, and asked, “Heeey, so you totally… don’t sell blackjacks, do you?” She looked down at the younger girl, who was probably her sister. “And do they come in fun size?”

* * *

Old Longfellow walked into a pub called The Bucket that contained a bunch of blokes in a uniform that wasn’t uniform, which nonetheless made it clear what they were. He walked back out.

A minute later, Constable Fiddyment, red-faced and panting, asked if anyone meeting Longfellow’s description had come by this way. A dozen Watchmen pointed back at the door.

* * *

Whalebone Lane was in the heart of one of the dwarf areas of Ankh-Morpork, which was why it was a horrible place for a half-elf to try to run a tavern. Nonetheless, there Mankin was, slogging along as proprietor of the Octarine Parrot.

Then a madman came in, drank all his Krullian rum, and picked a fight with the one troll patron in his bar, one who had come to listen to his troll singer. Unusually for humans who picked fights with trolls, he wasn’t now a hole in the wall of that hole in the wall dive. He was, inexplicably, alive.

 _No_ , Mankin later told Constable Hrolf Thighbiter, who, despite being a dwarf, was setting aside his species-deep hatred of elves to take a witness statement, _the stinking soused man had last been seen blundering down towards Treacle Mine Road._

On the stage, his troll singer, Gneiss, sat, complaining about how the dreadful man had blown her a kiss.

* * *

The Helmet and Shield Pub had seen the man, all right. So had the Treacle Miners hostelry pub. So had every tavern, pub and bar from there to Garlickhythe. They had a laundry list of complaints to lodge with Constable Wee Mad Arthur, who was frankly bewildered that someone who wasn’t a Feegle could cause that much destruction and drink that much alcohol. Could old Longfellow actually be a Feegle who’d hit the Potions of Giant Growth really, really hard as a lad?

Lance-Constable Bauxite, who’d been down near Cockbill Street and saw the description on the clacks, almost caught up with him on Mud Lane.

But then the man vanished.

The snoring coming from under the tarps on the schooner _Milka_ was probably entirely unrelated, Bauxite decided.

* * *

“Out of curiosity, are you the younger brother?” Ponder asked, looking DiMA over, as DiMA stepped back into the HEM, avoiding the unusually bright sun.

DiMA appeared a little uncertain and had to think about that. “I believe I am the older.”

“Hm. Unusual,” said Ponder. Wizards usually tended to be bullied younger brothers. It was as if life wanted to say, ‘your older brother might have dunked your head in the privy, but at least you can throw fireballs’.

“What did you wish of me?” DiMA inquired. He was clearly very, very wary of Ponder and his students, as if he expected them to do something horrible to him at any moment. Still, he followed Ponder back to one of the workspaces.

Ponder had to admit that something horrible might happen, but if it did, it wouldn’t be intentional on his part. He just wanted to sort out what DiMA had done. Ponder picked up a wooden wand of his, the same one that DiMA had previously grabbed, and he held it out to DiMA and asked, “What happened with this?”

DiMA hesitantly took the wand from Ponder and said, “I - I was frightened of Longfellow, because he was going to kill me. I wanted to defend myself, and Nick had taken my gun, so I reached back, and I thought I’d grabbed a shock baton.” He turned the wand over in his hands, squinting at it. Then he tapped along the length of it, listening.

“And then?” Ponder prompted.

“It made sparks…” DiMA murmured. He slid a metal finger along the carved runes, tracing them.

Specifically, it had made octarine sparks. Managing a little shocking surprise was something many boy wizards figured out on their own. An electric handshake was a great defense against older brothers. There was nothing special about channeling a little lightning into a stick.

Except.

Ponder prodded, “Do you think it’s a shock baton now?”

“No,” DiMA admitted.

“Do you think it can make sparks?” Ponder said.

DiMA looked as if Ponder had asked him a trick question. His lips set into a thin frown. “I know it can make sparks. It already did it.” He put the stick behind his back, held in his metal hand, and raised it back in front of him, as if he wanted to crack someone over the head with it. There was a small shower of sparks, which DiMA looked at thoughtfully.

No, there was nothing special about making sparks, except that Ponder had personally locked that wand so that it could only produce paint spells for the team building exercises he sometimes had to endure at faculty retreats. He took the wand back from DiMA and tried, as hard as he could, to channel Atavarr's Personal Gravitational Upset through it. Paint hit the ceiling and dripped down on the floor between them. The lock was still in place. DiMA shouldn’t have been able to get sparks out of that wand. No one should have been able to get sparks out of that wand.

Ponder was perhaps one of the few wizards on the Disc who could look at a clockwork man like DiMA and readily admit that a machine might be able to cast spells, because Ponder had a hand in creating Hex, and Hex was a machine who could cast thousands of spells a minute. Hex could take spells apart and decipher their commonalities. Hex could even put together new spells from basic pieces, which still unnerved Ponder slightly.

So why shouldn’t something that looked like a cross between Hex and a man, where the _deus ex machina_ met the fallen ape, be able to cast spells?

“It does paint as well?” DiMA inquired, looking at the viscous green dripping from the ceiling and pooling on the floor.

Ponder had heard stories about wizards who didn’t know what they were doing, mostly young students, being able to cast things they shouldn’t. Those stories usually ended with very small pairs of boots and clouds of dust. But DiMA had gotten sparks out of a locked wand. Whether or not machines should cast spells, DiMA shouldn’t have been able to do that particular magic on that particular wand.

Ponder frowned. “It only does paint. You shouldn’t be able to make sparks.”

“May I see it again?” asked DiMA, and Ponder let him, and DiMA made sparks again. Then he dribbled some glowing blue paint on the floor. “How does it do that?”

“Magic,” Ponder said brusquely. The Commonwealth was a low magic setting, and Ponder was primed for a tiresome round of convincing DiMA that magic existed.

“I imagine,” DiMA said wryly, instead, “but how does it work?”

DiMA actually meant the question he was asking. Ponder was startled to find that out, after a bit of interrogative back and forth. DiMA _really_ meant the question he was asking, and that led to an excited round of taking DiMA around the Library, introducing him to the Librarian - DiMA avoided the m-word all on his own, very interesting - and checking out copies of _Woddeley's Occult Primer_ and the _Necrotelicomnicon Discussed for Students, with Practical Experiments_ and pressing those well-thumbed incunables into DiMA’s mismatched hands and dropping him back off with Ponder’s other students - he resigned himself to the fact that he’d just acquired another student; maybe this one might actually do the bloody grading - and assuring DiMA that Ponder would be back in a bit, he just had a Council meeting.

DiMA wanted to know how magic worked.

Ponder thought this was nice.

* * *

Vimes left Shaun and young Sam to draft up a binding territorial contract as to which aspects of the room belonged to which boy. Young Sam, for example, was claiming the window, because his father had cunningly booby-trapped it to slide down and drop out if someone tried to climb it from the outside, but Shaun could have the space under both beds, because that just meant Shaun had more cleaning to do.

They had servants. Young Sam still had to clean his room, and now Shaun would, too. Vimes felt it was the principle of the thing. When Vimes had been that age, he would have been happy to have the underside of one bed to himself. His mother, rest her soul, would have seen to it that he kept it spotless.

Then Vimes settled down in one of their sitting rooms with Sybil to, as he had promised, explain how Shaun was made. He started hesitantly, “So I said that he’s the same blood as our young Sam. Mostly.”

“He certainly looks it,” Sybil said neutrally.

Shaun looked like young Sam, if young Sam was ten rather than seven. Precisely so.

“So, when I was dragged into that icono-game, I…” Vimes took a deep breath. “I was frozen, but I didn’t die. I awoke briefly, but I was still frozen. I saw you die by a mercenary’s hand, and I saw some witch carry off our young Sam. Eventually, I thawed, but I couldn’t say how much time had passed. I knew I had to find our young Sam and your murderer. So I did.”

Sybil didn’t ask what Vimes had done when he found what he thought was her murderer. He appreciated that. Vimes imagined that she could tell by his eyes.

“Our young Sam… well, he wasn’t our young Sam, he was that bloody icono-game’s concept of what might be _fun_ ,” Vimes said bitterly. “He was in his sixties. Older than me. I’d been a right sorry sherbet that long. He was the Director of something called the Institute. You’ll hear Shaun talk about it. You remember back in ‘74, when the wizards conquered the city?”

“Oh yes, Havelock was new in office, and those rapscallions turned him into a small yellow lizard,” reminisced Sybil.

“So, imagine if Unseen University was hidden underground, had wizards _and_ witches, and wanted to take over the world by replacing key people with doppelganger golems made from blood,” Vimes hazarded, feeling his explanation was woefully inadequate.

Sybil considered. “That sounds more like something the Fair Folk would do. You know, they’ll make changeling replicas out of logs, dear.”

“Oughta be a law against that,” Vimes muttered. “ _Anyway_ , the whole reason that the Institute stole the fake young Sam was that his blood was better for making doppelganger golems because… it had been frozen a long time? I don’t know, it’s magic, it doesn’t have to make sense. And then the fake young Sam went and got old and took over the Institute and kept on making doppelganger golems to go undermine the Commonwealth so that his Institute could take it over.” He rubbed his eyes, shaking. It had all felt real. He suspected that it always would.

Sybil squeezed his hand. “That sounds dreadful, dear. I imagine you stopped it all.”

Vimes laughed mirthlessly. “...yes. Definitely. So young Sa… Shaun, he’s a doppelganger golem made with the fake young Sam’s blood. He’s not human. He’s a very fancy sort of golem. A fancier sort of the same type of golem that Nick Valentine and DiMA are. But he thinks he’s human. I don’t rightly know when the time to tell him will be, but I think he’s going through more than enough right now without piling that on his shoulders. He thinks I’m his father, so I’ll do the job.”

Sybil thought some more, then she said firmly, “Yes, of course we’ll look after him. He’s ours. Him not being human… is there anything special that we need to do?”

“I’m not entirely sure? His true name makes him more vulnerable than it does a human, I think, so it’s just as well that you changed his name,” Vimes said, thinking. “Ni… Valentine or DiMA might know more, but they’re an older sort of golem than he is. Deacon knew quite a bit about synths. He was working to free them.”

Gloomily, Vimes reflected that he’d been planning on leaving the whole ‘so, son, you aren’t human’ talk to Valentine. Now he found he didn’t know what was even supposed to go in that talk.

“I’ll have a word with them,” Sybil said.

There. That was settled. Now Vimes had to tell her the rest of it. 

“Sybil, I, er, need to tell you something. Aside from all the other somethings, like golem Sa - Shaun. I thought you were dead.” Vimes nervously pulled from his pocket the wedding band, identical to the one on Sybil’s thankfully very much alive hand. “Although that's really no excuse. I…” He swallowed. It was like ripping off a scab, wasn't it? Better in one go? “... Was unfaithful to you.”

“I see,” said Sybil levelly, looking at the band identical to her own that sat in Vimes’s hand. “Isn’t Miss Piper Wright a bit too young for you?”

Vimes choked. “Oh, no… I turned down Miss Wright when she asked if she could court me. No, we weren’t lovers.”

Sybil blinked, apparently questioning both why a lady was attempting to court a man, when Sybil felt it ought to be the other way around, even if the lady had to lead the man into courting her every single step of the road, and also wondering: if not the only grown woman in the group, then who else?

There were entirely too many shoes to drop. They were long past the other shoe dropping. They were dropping a whole shoe store and several irate gnomes. Vimes cleared his throat. “With a him, actually.”

Sybil seemed to expect him to go on. 

“Er, apparently, it's a thing, liking women and men? What was it Nick called it… oh, right. Bisexual. I’m bisexual.” On Cockbill Street, they would have called it, ‘Liable to get coshed inna head,’ and that was why Vimes had looked and not touched, until the Commonwealth, where people had more pressing priorities than who was knocking boots with whom. Except for Piper. 

Sybil seemed to consider that and finally said, “That explains certain things. Did you love him?”

There was a trap, and Vimes knew it. On the one hand, he ought to say that Sybil was the only one he had ever loved and that anything else was meaningless, but that would then imply he'd throw himself into meaningless debauchery the moment Sybil wasn't around. On the other hand, did he want to imply he would go and fall in love so easily? 

But what it really came down to is that Sam Vimes did not want to lie, not least of all to his wife. He closed his eyes. “I do love him, although I haven't said as much.”

“Why?” asked Sybil. 

His eyes fluttered open. “Which why?”

“Both.”

There were a large number of things he could say of Nick, but what immediately came to mind was, “Nick helped me find Sa - er - Shaun. He didn't have to, and there weren't many who would have. The Commonwealth was… unwelcoming.” He grimaced, thinking about how he had responded to a cry for help and found an ambush and a pile of bodies and how depressingly common episodes like those were. “He took so many personal risks for me. We ran a dead man's memories on his mind, trying to find Shaun, some risky sort of Borrowing that Witch Amari had never tried before. But he’s like that with everyone, always trying to help. Even in distant towns, I found people who would thank him for what he’s done. The only people who had anything ill to say of him were frankly terrible people themselves.” He thought about Myrna, refusing synths service. 

“He sounds nice,” agreed Sybil.

Vimes continued, “Always tries to talk his enemies down in a fight,” not always, not that one time, “a bang-up detective, funny, brave, kind to children…”

“And you didn't tell him you loved him… Why?”

Because Vimes wasn't nearly as nice as people wanted to think he was, he wanted to say. Gods knew, Nick had enough self-esteem issues as it was. An ‘I love you,’ wouldn't have hurt anything. He should have told Nick, and now, Vimes couldn't see it doing anything but making everything worse. “I was just so focused on finding Shaun. It never seemed like a good time.” 

“I’d like to meet him properly,” Sybil said quietly, firmly. “But he’s… one of those two… golems? You never did get around to telling me much about them.”

“Golems of a sort, I suppose. Nick Valentine and DiMA, his brother. That’s one thing about Nick… Mr. Valentine that I wish Ms. Perkins had told me when I first went looking for him, that Mr. Valentine isn’t human,” Vimes said, shaking his head. “She told me Valentine wears a fedora and a trenchcoat and didn’t tell me that he’s a clockwork man with grey skin and lovely glowing amber eyes like lanterns.”

Sybil thought about all of that, and once she was done processing it, she sounded confused. “You couldn't figure out how a dwarf and a troll -”

“I _know_ , I figured it out,” Vimes said hotly, putting away the duplicate ring. Having a fling with a male nonhuman was probably the last thing anyone expected of him, and yet, there it was. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: *hands up* Before you break out the torches and pitchforks, check the tags. 
> 
> S: At any rate, the first fic essentially sets up why and how these characters wind up in Ankh-Morpork, while this fic serves to establish their places in this world. Like the tutorial dungeon of a video game, the first fic ran on a pretty focused plot centered around a limited perspective, but now it’s time for our characters to explore the open world. Getting used to the new user interface may take a little time, though…
> 
> S: Also, here’s a bit of fun series trivia for you: the final section of this chapter was actually the first scene written in this series, written originally by A as she watched me play through Fallout. It’s undergone a lot of revision since then, but that was our starting point.
> 
> A: “Don’t worry, Sam! There’s a troll and a dwarf in Lobbin Clout who have set up home together, so I’ve heard. Good for them, I say, it’s their business and definitely not ours.” [Snuff]
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	2. Bar Tab * Born Yesterday * An Intentional

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [An Honest Mistake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8vzbezVru4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=6&t=0s) by The Bravery, and [Someone You Loved](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM8EbCubuMg&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=6) by Lewis Capaldi.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Bar Tab * Born Yesterday * An Intentional_

Codsworth made his way to Scoone Avenue and was very surprised when Willikins hired him at the standard rate. Codsworth wasn’t expecting to be hired, or more specifically, he wasn’t expecting to be paid. To some extent, Codsworth still thought that Vimes owned him. Willikins presented Codsworth a receipt that Vimes had written up, which stated that Codsworth owned himself, and Willikins further explained that he’d have to take Codsworth down to the Guild of Butlers, Valets, and Gentlemen's Gentlemen so that he could enroll as a member in good standing.

Guilds. They sounded just a bit Communist, Codsworth had to admit.

Dogmeat showed up at the Vimes manor and found Shaun and young Sam and convinced them to sneak into the kitchen to get him treats.

Piper made sure that Carrot included the Times’ main office in the remainder of the tour. Miss Cripslock had already mentioned to Piper that her attire was somewhat… obscene, as a helpful aside, just between girls. So the Maul had been added to the tour. Nat came away with a Captain Carrot One-Man City Watch with a complete wardrobe of toy weapons and Ghastly Omnian Inquisition Torture Chamber with Wind-Up Rack and Nearly Real Blood You Can Use Again. Piper hoped Nat wouldn’t use those toys together, but Nat probably would.

Garvey was shown the Armory, which was where Ankh-Morpork kept its collection of interesting weapons that it had nicked off other countries. He was rather romantically enchanted by the concept that Ankh-Morpork depended on its men to raise civilian militias in its times of need. Garvey listened, rapt, as Carrot explained how Mister Vimes, who had then been the knight Sir Samuel at the time, had raised his own regiment and gone off to Klatch to arrest two opposing armies.

The thing that rather spoiled it for Garvey was that Vimes had been a knight at the time and was a Duke now. Garvey still thought Vimes was a good person and still, in fact, had a bit of an embarrassing crush on him, but Garvey was also, in a sense, what America could be at its best, and Americans have always been suspicious of any whiff of monarchism, even with a decidedly absent king.

So why did Garvey have the feeling he was looking at said absent king?

Deacon wanted to see that Golem Trust that Vimes had mentioned. He also wanted to see more about the semaphore or clacks system, as they called it. Deacon wanted to see an awful lot of things, and he was just starting to catch on to the fact that Carrot was significantly smarter than he looked. For one thing, Carrot had noticed that Deacon’s outfits switched at random, definitely noticed, although he politely hadn’t commented.

Strong wanted to go see Detritus. He didn’t know what Detritus was, but he was dazzled by an entity that carried around a siege weapon, and Detritus seemed to follow Vimes, Strong’s chosen leader, which practically made them the same community, in Strong’s book3. Detritus, who was cunning in the way of old sergeants, asked Strong his opinion on drugs.

Upon understanding that drugs were basically chems, Strong promptly ranted, “Bah! Chems are for weaklings. Chems make all humans weak. This why super mutants not use chems.”

So Detritus promptly swore Strong in.

Valentine wanted a bar where he could drink in peace and mourn everything he’d ever known, and finding one proved challenging even for Captain Carrot, who knew everyone. The human bars looked at Valentine and saw a sort of Undead. The Undead bars looked at Valentine and saw something Unalive. The Unalive didn’t have bars. Carrot eventually found a dwarf bar that was willing to serve Nick ales thick enough to chew when they realized that the Duke’s account was paying for it.

The Duke. Sam Vimes was a goddamned Duke. His knight in shining armor, indeed. A little part of Valentine wanted to find where Vimes lived and throw all of his tea into the Ankh, where it would probably just sit on the crust. Had Valentine ever really known Vimes at all? Oh, Vimes had tried to tell him, and Valentine hadn’t listened.

And now Vimes wasn’t listening.

That was that, then. Vimes was off with his family, and Valentine was left behind. It wasn't like he was a person, anyway, in every sense possible. He was a fictional character made by some damn wizard computer, a fictional character of a machine pretending to be a dead man who had never lived. Vimes had made Valentine real, and he was gone. Oh, Valentine expected that he would see Vimes again, and there would be some awkward failure of communication between them and… 

Anyway, Carrot, who seemed to be a teetotaller, knew dwarf bars, and the dwarfs there clearly knew Carrot, and because Valentine had come in with Carrot, the dwarfs seemed content enough to mostly ignore Valentine while he drank on what was ultimately Vimes's tab. If this had been Diamond City, Valentine would have known everyone. So far, he had been able to pick up that dwarfs sang a lot about how much they loved gold, although, cynically, he thought they were just saying so to get it in bed. There were fights. There was a shorter dwarf who took advantage of the distraction during fights to lighten pockets. 

Valentine was going to need to read the Ankh-Morpork legal code. Aside from Carrot’s explanation, Vimes had also said something about a legal Thieves’s Guild, comparing it to the insurance agents that had once existed in the fictional world from which Valentine was generated. So, hands itching, he did nothing about the pickpocket. 

But Carrot, with his glass of milk, noticed that Valentine noticed, and Carrot commented that the Watch was hiring.

Then a human, clearly a servant, awkwardly entered the dwarf bar, looking for Valentine. He approached and stated that Her Grace, Lady Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Vimes (née Ramkin), the Duchess of Ankh would see him now. The servant looked uncertain about Valentine. 

Valentine was uncertain about Valentine. 

3 It was a colouring book.

* * *

Corporal Reg Shoe, Constable Fiddyment, Constable Wee Mad Arthur, and Lance-Constable Bauxite showed up at the front door of the Vimes residence. Watchmen used the front door. Vimes insisted. Reg was nominally in charge, on account of seniority, and so when Willikins brought Vimes to see his men, Reg explained, “We lost your… friend? That old Longfellow… fellow.”

“Lost him? On a tour with Carrot?” Vimes said. “Gods. There’s a thousand ways to lose him in this city. Longfellow… he was like my father.”

“To be fair, Captain Carrot did try to take them to the Dwarf Bread Museum,” said Reg.

Vimes winced. “That would do it.”

“And then he went on a rampage through every tavern, public house, and bar between the Dwarf Bread Museum and Mud Lane,” said Reg, flipping through his notebook, “and that’s where we lost all trail. Lance-Constable Bauxite was the last to see him.”

“Mud Lane… that’s right near the Pearl Dock,” said Vimes, thinking. “Anyone check the boats?”

The Watchmen looked at each other and looked at Bauxite, who said, “Yah. I checked. They’re boats, sir.”

Vimes sighed.

Reg sent Fiddyment and Wee Mad Arthur scrambling back off, mumbling, “You two go double-check those boats. Now, Mister Vimes,” he flipped through his notebook and pulled out over a dozen receipts, “these are the bills from all those taverns, public houses, and bars, including damages.”

Vimes looked blearily at all the receipts. “...Longfellow’s too much like my father. Willikins, see to these, would you?”

* * *

Piper, Nat, Preston, and Deacon all wound up at the Treacle Miners hostelry and pub, which Carrot informed them had been the site of the former Night Watch House, back when Carrot had first arrived in the city. The first floor looked like a nor’easter had gone through it, but the rooms had fresh straw, and the cockroaches were tiny and had the good sense of shame to at least make themselves unseen when the candles were lit. The four of them sat around one of the repair-in-progress tables in the pub area and settled in for lunch together.

At first they sat in silence. That morning, they had been living their lives, each trying in his or her own way to make the post-Institute Commonwealth a slightly better place. Now they were fictional characters made real, and everything they'd ever known was wrong. What did you talk about when you'd had a day like that?

Preston Garvey, who was thoughtfully stirring a stew of some sort with his spoon, was the one who finally broke the silence. "I guess that explains the werewolf comment."

Deacon barked out a laugh, while Piper and Nat looked confused. Nat narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "What werewolf comment?"

Preston looked a little embarrassed. "I... well, I asked him and Nick if they'd decided on an open relationship, and he told me I was too young and should look for someone more my own age, like a 'nice werewolf'."

Piper gave a rueful chuckle. "You, too, huh?"

Preston smiled sadly. "Yeah." He took a bite of his stew.

Deacon, who'd had the misfortune of witnessing both of those conversations, made an exasperated noise as he paged through a tourist guide he had picked up from somewhere. Before either Piper or Preston could get any further along the topic of Sam Vimes oriented crushes, he said, "It explains a lot of the weird stuff he'd go on about. Even I wasn't quite sure if he was lying or just crazy." He shrugged. "Jury's still out on 'crazy', but at least I can rule out the lying."

Piper sighed. “God, he even tried to tell me, and I told him the Institute was getting to him! I had forgotten about that.” She peered at Deacon. "He also said he told you, and that you didn't believe him?"

Deacon snorted and closed the guide. "Hate to admit it, but he had me there. I told him he needed to work on his delivery." He laughed. "Guess he did." He sawed off a corner of what the server insisted was actual beef. Given that their tour had briefly brought them through the slaughter district, where they had seen actual cows, the servers might even have been telling the truth. Of course, “named meat” was extra, but they were on Vimes’s tab. Deacon took a bite, chewed it, then swallowed. Piper seemed to be enjoying something similar with potatoes. 

"Okay, so... he wasn't lying to us, but... he wasn't exactly truthful, was he?" Piper complained, as if searching for a way to blame it all on ‘Blue’.

"Usually he was," Preston answered, looking around. "It's just we all... either pretended not to hear the strange stuff he was saying, or treated it like he was joking, so he mostly stuck to the immediate problems." Then he shrugs. "At least that's what I remember when I was around."

"Well, he never mentioned that he was a Duke! Or a Watch Commander!" Piper protested.

Preston tilted his head and thought about that. "Actually, he did ask me if I'd call him Commander instead of General once."

"And he seemed to take some of my comments about cops kind of personally," Deacon pointed out. "So he at least dropped some hints. He was definitely telling the truth when he kept insisting he wasn't a soldier."

"Except for when he raised a militia," Preston pointed out.

"You mean the first time?" Deacon asked, amused. "The militia that was really just a glorified police-force?" Then he smirked faintly. "I guess your Minutemen weren't his first rodeo."

"According to the Captain, he stopped a war," Preston argued. "If someone can manage that with a police force, that sounds like a pretty great militia."

"Okay, but he definitely didn't mention the Duke thing," Piper doggedly argued.

"What is a Duke, anyway?" Nat asked.

"Some sort of old-fashioned nobility," Preston explained, and then he added, "And yeah, that was weird." He took another bite of stew.

"I got the impression he was embarrassed. Anyone else catch that?" Deacon asked, studying the others.

Preston shook his head. "I was kind of overwhelmed with the whole skull-computer, vampire photographer, troll officer, and everything else," he admitted. "But he wasn't always one. Didn't the Captain say Sam was 'just a knight' when he stopped the war with, what was it, Klatch?"

"I think he must have married into at least some of that," Deacon said thoughtfully. "He's carried himself like someone used to being obeyed, sure, but the whole 'Commander of the Watch' thing explains that. He doesn't carry himself like someone born to money. His wife sure did, though."

The conversation petered off into silence once more, until finally, Nat asked, "So, uhm... what are we going to do, anyway?"

Piper shrugged. "I figured I'd try for a job with one of the local papers. Probably the Ankh-Morpork Times? That was the one Blue mentioned, right?"

"Yeah, and their editor's name. Which I thought must have been some sort of joke, but..." and then Deacon waved around a newspaper he had picked up. "There it is in the credits. So... Miss Wright wants to go work for Mr. de Worde writing words, huh?"

Piper sighed. "If I do, I'm never going to hear the end of that, am I?"

Deacon beamed. "Nope!"

"I bet their presses are in better shape," Nat said thoughtfully after she swallowed a bit of potato, then added excitedly, "and they've got color pictures on some of their pages!"

"What about you guys?" Piper asked, looking between Preston and Deacon.

Preston shook his head. "I'm not really sure. This is an... amazing city, but it's a lot more crowded than anything I'm used to dealing with. The Captain said something about the Clacks system needing more guards while they get some of their towers built? A light communication system for bringing people together... seems like a worthwhile cause." Then he grinned sheepishly. "And since it looks like I'll need to find some sort of paying job..."

"Preston, how _did_ the Minutemen take care of supplies and... and... well, everything, anyway?" Piper asked, eyes narrowed.

"Donations, mostly," Preston shrugged.

"What, like, 'give us your food and we'll keep you safe' sort of donations?" Deacon asked suspiciously.

The former Minuteman frowned and shook his head. "No, we helped anyone we could when they wanted it, and just kind of... hoped that enough of them would find some way to return the favor. I think you're getting us confused with the Brotherhood."

"So you... kept yourselves supplied on hope," Deacon said slowly. "How'd that work out for you, anyway?"

"Pretty well, until things fell apart, and when they did, I don't really think that was the problem. And when we managed to start putting things back together, it worked pretty well, then. You were there," Preston pointed out. "Maybe it didn't always work, but it worked often enough to be worth doing without, you know, trying to force people."

"Well enough in a fictional world," Deacon pointed out, leaning back in his seat. Then he sat up and started wobbling the not-fully-repaired table, as if checking to see how close it was to collapsing. "Sounds like a kind of naive way to run a militia in a real world, but hey, what would I know?"

"I don't know, Deacon, what would you know?" Preston snapped, exasperated. "Should I bow to your cynical, world-weary experience, since you've apparently been existing in the 'real world' so much longer than I have? Except you haven't." He shook his head. "Sure, I'm hopeful, but that doesn't mean I'm an idiot. It's not like I was born yesterday.” He grinned and added, “It's more like both of us were born today."

Deacon stared at Preston for a moment, face impassive, and then he barked out another laugh. "All right, my man, fair enough," he conceded.

"So what are you going to do, anyway, mister?" Nat peered at Deacon. 

"I don't know, I was thinking of living off 'Commander Vimes’s'," he said the title and name with an exaggerated formality, "tab for as long as I could get away with it, then go hit up the Beggar's Guild. Sounds fun!"

"Seriously?" Preston asked doubtfully.

"Absolutely," Deacon lied. 

* * *

From the dwarf bar, the servant took him in a carriage and then back around a rather large estate and through what was, Valentine suspected, a servant's entrance, and he wondered if he was supposed to be offended. The servant tried to take his hat and coat, and Nick coldly refused. The hat stayed on. That was how Nick Valentine ended up at a late tea with Lady Sybil Vimes. 

There was a pleasant tea table with a window view, set with tea for one, those fancy little cucumber sandwiches, and a glass of what was, unless his sensors were deceiving him, a very fine sherry for him. Lady Sybil Vimes sat at the other side of the table. Nick had seen her briefly, the picture of a worried wife, when Sam had pulled them all out of Hex’s icono-game world. Sam and her and young Sam and synth Sam, who was now a Shaun had all gone off for Sam to explain to his wife that they now had a second child and a dog and a robot butler and wasn't that just the sweetest thing. 

No one had asked Valentine any input on Shaun’s name. He’d been ‘Dad’ to the boy for a month. Sybil had been ‘Mother’ to him for less than a day. He would have liked to have been asked. Valentine would have liked a lot of things.

He didn't know how to bow or curtsy or whatever damn thing it was one did before a Duchess, and the servant had left. For such a large building, he didn't hear many people near. Lady Sybil didn't want whatever she had to say here to be overheard, he supposed. Valentine walked over to her, held out his metal hand, and introduced, “Nick Valentine, private detective.”

Lady Sybil studied his hand for a moment before shaking it carefully as if a handshake was some heathen custom and she was a diplomat determined not to ruin trade relations. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Valentine. I am Lady Sybil Deidre Olgivanna Vimes. I am given to understand you were one of my husband's… Companions in that strange game.”

Valentine gave a short, bitter laugh and sat down at the other chair. “Companions. Sure, if that's what the kids are calling it these days. Er, he did tell you -”

“Yes, of course,” said Lady Sybil as if there was no doubt that Vimes would tell her. 

Valentine picked up the sherry at his setting and swirled it pensively. Closer, it smelled even better. More than that, it smelled _expensive_. Pre-War. But there had never been the War. Staring into the sherry, he said, “Sam Vimes is a hell of a man. Best partner I ever had.” _Even if I apparently didn’t know him one whit._ “You’re a lucky lady, madam.”

“I am,” she agreed. “Sam spoke well of you.”

“Did he? Must not be feeling well,” Valentine said dourly, and he took an experimental sip of the sherry. His optics dimmed with pleasure; damn, but Lady Sybil had good taste in sherry. Or rather, her sommelier did. A fancy lady like her probably had someone to pick out her booze for her, although this was so fancy that it stopped being booze. He looked up from the sherry. “It wasn't his fault, y’know. He really thought you were dead. I’m happy you're not dead, by the way,” and he meant it, “for Sam’s sake.”

Vimes deserved a nice, real, flesh-and-blood wife. 

“I’m happy I'm not dead, too,” Lady Sybil said dryly. “You call him Sam?” There was an arch unspoken, ‘He allows you to call him Sam?’

“Uh-huh,” said Valentine, having another sip of the sherry, rolling the liquid bliss over his tongue. 

“He’s usually Commander Vimes to…” she paused a moment, “...beings like you.”

“I expect,” said Valentine. “Make sure he's not too hard on himself?” He found himself saying that, despite it all. Everything Valentine had heard from Carrot and other other folks in the city seemed to suggest that Vimes was, in reality, every bit as good as he’d been in the unreality that was the Commonwealth, despite being rich and a Duke, and no good would come of a decent man flogging himself over a mistake. Valentine just wished that he wasn’t the mistake in question. 

“That, Mr. Valentine, is a singularly difficult task,” Lady Sybil sighed. “But enough about that. What about you, Mr. Valentine? What were your plans?”

“Catch a ship to Fourecks. Hostile wildlife, destruction derbies… Sounds homey,” Valentine said flippantly. He’d heard about Fourecks from a dwarfen opal miner. Of course, Valentine didn’t want to leave DiMA behind, because Valentine suspected that, even if DiMA had never actually killed anyone, that his brother probably needed a parole officer, and DiMA wouldn’t really want to stay at Unseen University, would he? Valentine could just grab DiMA whenever the wizards released him, after checking whatever it was they had to double-check, and they could look into cheap boat tickets. He didn’t want to leave… Shaun behind, either, but there was a custody battle he’d never win. Finally, there was Vimes. Goddamned Vimes, who’d gone and done what a good, married man ought to do and gone promptly back to his lawfully wedded wife and dropped Valentine like a stolen hot potato.

Valentine had wondered, briefly, if he might be able to ask Lady Sybil for permission to date her husband. He could have done that, if he was in the Commonwealth. Love was rare enough as it was. If someone found two people, they were lucky. Why begrudge your sweetie one of those rare shots at happiness? But this wasn’t the Wasteland. Valentine didn’t know what Ankh-Morpork was, but it didn’t feel like the kind of place where he could ask a Duchess for permission to canoodle with her husband.

“Fourecks is on the other side of the Disc,” said Lady Sybil mildly, looking at Nick over her tea. 

“I know. That was sort of the point, madam,” Valentine admitted.

Lady Sybil steepled her fingers. “And when you thought I was dead?”

Valentine had sort of hoped that Vimes would have returned the favour that Valentine had extended to him. In the Commonwealth, Vimes had moved in with Valentine. Here, he’d sort of imagined, Valentine would have moved in with Vimes, and maybe the cultural climate for it was wrong, maybe they couldn’t have married, but they could have been partners. Could he say that to Vimes’s wife, in his house? Valentine stared into his sherry. “When I learned that I wasn't real but that I could come back with Sam to Ankh-Morpork, I was a bit excited by the thought that I might be able to join an actual functional police force. One where, if a gangster murdered an innocent woman, he couldn’t turn evidence and walk.”

“That,” observed Lady Sybil, “is oddly specific.”

“Is it?” Valentine said mildly. 

“We would need to speak with Sam, of course, but I don't see why that shouldn't still be an option,” said Lady Sybil. 

Valentine was glad that he was only holding his glass of sherry and wasn't actively engaged in drinking it at that moment, because he might have sputtered and that would have been a criminal waste of sherry. Vimes’s wife wanted the other man around? 

“You aren't exactly a golem, are you, Mr. Valentine?” Lady Sybil continued. 

Many people did not know what Nick Valentine was. Sam Vimes clearly knew: a golem. It was just that what Sam Vimes knew was wrong. Valentine admitted, “No, madam. I’m a synth. A synthetic man.”

“And that darling boy Sam brought home - we’re calling him Shaun, and thank you ever so much for helping find him - he is a ‘synth’, as well?” continued Lady Sybil. 

Valentine rubbed the back of his head, not sure where Lady Sybil was going with this. “Uh, yeah. A Gen 3. Newer model.”

“Shaun could use a proper role model,” Lady Sybil concluded. 

Valentine felt alarmed and protested, “Madam, I am no role model.”

“And Sam would say the same thing of himself, and I would disagree with him, as well,” said Lady Sybil. 

“Sam _is_ a role model,” Valentine argued, despite himself. “He shines like a jewel under the wasteland sun, always ready to help a soul in need.” He was angry with Vimes, and he hurt like a knife in the fuel pump, but he couldn’t deny the good that Vimes had done, the good that had attracted him to Vimes in the first place.

“Why don't we go talk to Sam?” Lady Sybil said, and it was, in the way of nobility, a command, not a question. 

Valentine took the sherry with him. They passed an open door, and inside, Codsworth and a man servant who looked rather more important than all the other servants, a real gentleman's gentleman, were staring each other down like unfamiliar cats. Meanwhile, in a playroom, it appeared that Vimes was anxiously overseeing young Sam and Shaun, who were playing together like any set of brothers Nick had seen. 

Well. Maybe not _any_ set of brothers, he mentally corrected, thinking about DiMA. Vimes looked rather alarmed and, more than that, guilty at the sight of his wife with Valentine, as if he regretted that his wife was being inconvenienced by interacting with his ex-boyfriend. Well, no, perhaps Valentine was being too hard in his thoughts, there; Vimes actually appeared to be a mix of utterly miserable and terrified. He looked like he needed a stiff drink and knew precisely how much he couldn’t have one.

Shaun looked up and ran over to Valentine, giving him a tight, clinging hug. He turned to his brother and said, “This is my… er. This is Mr. Nick Valentine.” He sagged a bit and looked up at Valentine apologetically. “He’s a detective. I want to be a detective, just like him, when I’m grown.”

Valentine carefully gave Shaun a pat on the head with his synth flesh hand, while young Sam countered, “My father's a detective. My father's the boss detective!”

“Your father is my father, so my father is also the boss detective,” countered Shaun, quite reasonably. 

“My father took me on vacation, and we solved a mystery,” said young Sam smugly. 

Shaun let go of Valentine reluctantly and asked his father, “Can we go on vacation and solve crimes?”

“That’s generally not the point of vacation,” said Lady Sybil gently. She looked to her husband and said, “If I could speak with you and Mr. Valentine?”

“Is Mr. Valentine going to live with us?” asked Shaun, with the sort of shy hope that one tendered when one was quite certain one was going to be crushed but wished to ask anyway. “We’ve got lots of spare rooms.”

Valentine did choke on his sherry, which was something of a feat, insofar as he didn't actually have a gag reflex. Vimes had a rather poleaxed expression on his face, and he let Lady Sybil take them both to another room in the voluminous mansion, where there was lovely old wood furniture and decadent upholstery and no sign or sound of servants anywhere near. Lady Sybil and Vimes sat down on a loveseat, and Valentine took a chair on the other side of a table, setting down his glass of sherry. 

Valentine sighed, “Look, I'm sorry about this. You have a lovely family, and like I was telling Lady Sybil, I'll just move to Fourecks and -”

Vimes seemed like he’d been expecting something like that, bracing himself for it, dreading it, but nonetheless didn’t want to hear it.

Lady Sybil broke in firmly, “Like I was telling Mr. Valentine, I was thinking it would be good for Shaun to have another _synth_ around.”

Vimes’s eyes narrowed, and if it had been Nick there, one would have been able to hear transistors humming with strained thought. 

Lady Sybil continued, “I just don't see why a friend of my Sam ought to exile himself to Fourecks over a little accident.”

“It was more of an intentional,” muttered Vimes. 

It was a little hard to make the same accident at least three times a week. 

Lady Sybil said brightly, “Besides, Mr. Valentine did express an interest in joining the Watch, and you said he was a good detective, Sam.”

“A bang-up detective,” Vimes corrected, with some irritation, and then he seemed to remember that Valentine was there and looked as if he hadn't quite meant to say that. 

Valentine protested, putting up his hands, “Yeah, but that was before I realized that you’re alive, and again, believe me, madam, I'm happy you're alive, but I wouldn't want to make things awkward.”

“Things are already awkward,” said Lady Sybil, and she wasn't wrong.

Valentine looked over at Vimes, who wouldn't quite meet Nick's optics. “Would you have me in the Watch?” 

At the suggestion that Valentine might be inclined to stay, it seemed that the terror in Vimes’s eyes eased a fraction. “I’d be lucky to.”

* * *

Though he’d told himself that Valentine and Vimes wouldn’t abandon him in an abattoir, DiMA had expected a nightmare involving a white and stainless steel room, restraints, an antiseptic-scented recliner with a row of long heavy gauge needles, being disassembled alive, and having every part of him that made him _him_ cease to be while some small part of him remained aware of what he had been, unable to scream. Instead, the walls were mostly institutional mint and bubblegum, and all that had happened was that Ponder assigned DiMA homework, which wasn’t even as bad as it sounded, because DiMA was interested in doing it.

He wanted to understand how the world worked, and this world appeared to work largely via magic. It hadn’t even made a sporting try at a coherent set of physical rules. It had just shrugged its shoulders, given up, and flogged off to have a smoke.

The shoddy secret about magic was that anyone with a little intelligence and perseverance could do it. If one also had just enough common sense, one might even survive to do it some more. Hardly anyone ever realized this fact, because wizards and witches had both covered their particular fiefdoms of magic in so much ritual and dogma that people had grown to accept that the trappings were necessary, and because they believed the trappings were necessary, they became necessary.

For those people, at least.

For example, most wizards were quite convinced that they needed a proper hat to do proper magic, and so, for them, a proper hat was indeed essential.

But DiMA had thought he was grabbing something that could produce a nasty electric shock, and he’d been in the High Energy Magic building, which had a high background magic field, and so his thought had become real, because DiMA didn’t know any better; didn’t know enough to think he couldn’t do that. Witches tended to work with what was there, but wizards could bend reality and put flesh on their dreams. It hadn’t mattered that the wand was locked. No one had told DiMA it was locked. Then, once DiMA knew it could make sparks, it had gotten easier. Something done once paved the way for it to be done again, easier the next time.

When DiMA had looked at a blackboard with apparently black chalk, he’d assumed that he ought to be able to read something there, because why would it exist otherwise, and because he thought he should be able to read something, he’d found that he could, although he had to squint rather hard to make out the barely-different-shade-of-black against the other shade of black. The blurriness made his optical sensors hurt, but he could do it.

DiMA sat down on a stool in a corner of one of the workrooms of the High Energy Magic building with the two books that Ponder had excitedly pressed into his hands. Before he opened either, he tried to calculate if there was an anisotropy in the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. If there was, it would suggest to him that he was still in a simulation.

Instead, DiMA calculated that there was _anise_ in the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, and he was left with the sensation of a pleasant liquorice flavour in his mouth4. He frowned, and he stalked over to where what was purported to be the best mainframe on the Disc resided.

Arrayed around Hex were Chatur Bakshi, who was Klatchian, Zinon Elias, from Ephebe, Xian Ju, from the Agatean Empire, and Alf Nealy, from Old New Lane in Dolly Sisters. Chatur looked a little like Faraday, though he was darker skinned, and his beard and mustache were longer and fuller, though still neatly trimmed.

Faraday wasn’t real.

No one loved DiMA.

Zinon was olive-skinned and had dark, curly hair, and his staff smelled faintly of sour grapes. There was something fishy about him.

Xian looked like what the propaganda posters had warned about with regards to Red China, if the Communists spent their time writing furiously in little notebooks and dotting their ‘i’s with hearts.

Alf had a sketchy beard and spotty face. His staff smelled of cheese.

All four of them were kitted out in white robes with pockets and white pointy hats, although the ribbons at the bottoms of their robe hems were different. Alf had what looked rather like DiMA’s memory transfer helmet on and was cursing, “Bloody thing won’t work anymore!”

Chatur looked over a bunch of printouts and bemoaned, “Compile errors like you wouldn’t believe. Something about pulling those Minds out of the game seems to have well knackered it.”

“And I had almost made it with Curie in my save file, too,” Alf seethed, taking off the helmet and throwing himself down into a chair with a huff.

They all looked a little startled when DiMA walked in, and Zinon said hurriedly, “No, Mr. Stibbons, we’re definitely not trying to get that icono-game back working again - oh, you’re not Mr. Stibbons. Whew.”

“You said Hex was the best mainframe on the Disc?” DiMA inquired. He was by design open-minded to the point of it being a character flaw. He had to be. A real utopian synth leader, if he wanted to protect his people, would take one look at a Brotherhood of Steel knight arriving on his island and say, ‘Cheese to that,’ and send the Courser Chase off to gank the knight into a crawler-infested pond at the first chance, but that wouldn’t do. Players couldn’t be cut off from interesting icono-game content just because of silly little things like choices they’d made. There couldn’t be consequences. So DiMA had to be open-minded enough to tolerate a Brotherhood initiate or an Institute operative running around his inner sanctum. He was easily open-minded enough to believe that an entity who went ‘parp’ and ran on ants and bees and a fish tank might be a mainframe.

“Won’t find a better one,” said Chatur proudly. He’d come to Unseen University for that very reason. Chatur hadn’t found anything actually useful to do with Hex, but by golly, he was doing useless things much better than anyone else was.

DiMA walked over to Hex and tapped a few commands into the keyboard, using a shorthand that none of the student wizards recognized. Then he frowned faintly over the answer, which was:

+++ Star anise. +++

Which was, of course, the _type_ of anise found in the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

4 In Roundworld, there was the hypothesis that, if Roundworld were a simulation, one would see an anisotropy in the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which is to say that the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays would appear different depending on which direction from which it was viewed. Roundworld is, of course, not a simulation. It sits in a box in Rincewind’s office.

* * *

Lady Sybil insisted on having a tailor - and apparently, tailors were very different than Seamstresses - take down Valentine’s measurements, and he soon found himself presented with not what his clothes looked like when they were new, as they were mostly polyester and other unrottable synthetics, but what his clothes wished they looked like when they were new, crisp and unrumpled and tailored exactly to his measurements. She'd insisted on account that he was absolutely coming to dinner and his current attire apparently wouldn't do. 

Vimes, who was awkward and pained and still wouldn't quite look at Valentine, again dropped him off with Captain Carrot, who was quite happy to swear in Valentine. It apparently involved a ritual with a penny on a string. Valentine was unable to keep a straight face during the Watchman's Oath, but thankfully, no one called him on it. Then Carrot dumped him on Sergeant Detritus. Trolls were both not organic and also not a robot, which was puzzling. Detritus seemed to be in charge of training, which mainly consisted of learning not to point the pointy end of a crossbow at his own face, which was something Valentine already knew. Detritus said Valentine was an advanced student, and Valentine rolled his optics. 

Very soon, all involved were in agreement that Valentine didn’t need any further training, because he was starting to get a bit of a concerning brittle look about him, and Detritus shouting at him wasn’t having the intended effect. No, Valentine would soon be starting on a month of night traffic duty. Starting on a month of nights was, apparently, traditional.

He was given a uniform and breastplate that, unlike the bespoke tailored outfit from Lady Sybil, did not fit him at all, and in fact chafed rather badly against some of the ragged areas where his synthetic flesh was torn. Valentine resolved to find excuses to wear it as seldom as possible. Tomorrow, he would set out on the streets as Lance-Constable Valentine, along with Constable Anvilfoot as his senior patrolman as they set out on the exciting world of night traffic duty. 

But before he had to face that special sort of hell, he had to face dinner with Lady Sybil. From arriving in the morning, to the tour with Carrot, to tea with Lady Sybil in the afternoon, to letting himself be talked into joining the Watch, to actually being sworn in, it had all just been a day, and it wasn’t over yet.

* * *

"So, tell me, Piper... Wright, is it?” William de Worde, editor-in-chief of the Ankh-Morpork _Times_ , began. “What makes you think you're qualified for a career in journalism?" Next to him sat Sacharissa Cripslock, the reporter who had been in the High Energy Magic building when Piper had arrived. From the look of things, Piper would have to field questions from them both.

Piper didn’t show her nervousness. She had always been pretty good about hiding it behind her bluster, anyway. "Are you kidding? Me an' my sis, we created the Commonwealth's only post-war newspaper on our own.” Having to go through an interview in order to be allowed to be a reporter again was a strange experience, especially since she had done her research and learned that the people doing the interviewing had more or less created their own jobs and were still, Piper suspected, figuring things out as they went themselves. She continued, “I've exposed corrupt militia captains, irradiated drinking water plots, price fixing schemes, badly patched infrastructure..."

"Yes, but... wasn't all that... backstory?” Mr. de Worde asked. “I'm given to understand that none of it actually happened, that what you’re describing is the history that was written for you." It seemed like Piper wasn’t the only one who had done her research.

"I guess you could say that,” Piper breezily shrugged off the question, “but now that I'm here and now that I'm real, wouldn't having that sort of 'backstory' make me just the sort of person who would have done those things? I mean, once the past is over, it's pretty much just our collective 'backstory', isn't it? But it's our backstories that make us who we are, or show us what we can be! Me, I'm someone who has a passion for bringing the truth to light so that people can make informed decisions, and that's been the truth for as long as I've been someone at all!"

Mr. de Worde looked thoughtful at Piper’s answer, but it was Cripslock that started, “I see. Well, Ms. Wright-”

“Please, call me Piper,” Piper interrupted.

“I’d rather not,” Cripslock replied coolly. She wore a wedding ring, and Piper had heard she was married to de Worde, but Piper wasn’t quite sure whether she should use ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’. Piper was pretty sure she had heard one of the other reporters call her ‘Miss’. “But that brings up another matter,” Miss Cripslock continued. “It’s clear that you come from a very different… cultural background. Do you think that might cause you difficulties?”

Piper nodded. “I mean, obviously I’m going to have to take some time to go through the archives,” she admitted, “get myself familiar with what even counts as news around here and what’s just, you know, normal everyday things, but sure, I can adjust.”

“So, you’ll be sure to stick with… decent attire?” It was sort of funny how Cripslock had kept her maiden name in a culture that had clearly expected her to do otherwise, but then got so hung up over Piper’s ‘slightly obscene’ pants. Like, seriously? Because it didn’t seem like Ankh-Morpork lacked for “obscenity”, and you’d think the pants would make it easier to get away!

Still, Piper had prepared for this to come up. “I can wear a skirt when I’m on the job, if that’s what you’re asking, but you know… funny thing about that, I’ve been spending a lot of time out around the city so far, trying to get a feel for what counts as ‘normal’ around here, and I notice that over on Short Street or Heroes Street you can see a lot of people with fewer, erm, layers than what I’ve usually got on. Shorter, too. Some of ‘em made of chainmail, from the looks.”

“Ah, yes,” Miss Cripslock allowed, “but you see, those are the areas of town where you’re more likely to get Hublanders and other types of barbarian heroes. Most of them are visitors to Ankh-Morpork, or new arrivals, and in a multicultural city such as ours, it’s important to respect the traditions of other peoples, even if they’re not ours.”

Did these people even listen to themselves sometimes? Piper pulled out a notebook and pencil. She just couldn’t help herself. She prompted her interviewer for clarification. “Unless… they’re trying to get a job at your newspaper, right?”

“None of them have tried!” Cripslock straightened and went defensive, while de Worde quietly watched the scene play out, his expression thoughtful. “Hublanders usually have little interest in the written word, and typically have a more… transient lifestyle. Not many of them can even read or write.”

“Right,” Piper replied. “So, you think Hublanders are ignorant savages, is what you’re saying.”

“I didn’t say that at all!” Miss Cripslock protected.

“Just heavily implied it.”

Cripslock sputtered while William de Worde burst out laughing. At the editor’s laughter, Cripslock cast him an indignant look. “Very clever, Miss Wright,” de Worde smiled, “but I’d like to remind you that right now, we’re the ones interviewing you.”

Piper smirked but then forced her expression into a more serious one. “Look, here’s the thing. I can tell that if I don’t conform to this whole… dress code business, it would cause a big enough distraction that it would make it harder for me to get my stories. So I’ll wear what I need to in order to get the job done. I can be practical.” It had been known to happen! “I just also admit that it seems like a… really weird thing to get hung up on. I arrived here completely covered!”

“But people could see your legs!” Cripslock protested.

“No they couldn’t, I had on p- trousers!” Piper argued, momentarily forgetting that these were the people she needed to impress in order to get the job.

“I mean,” Cripslock persisted, “they could see you had them!”

“Ma’am, you’re a reporter!” Piper exclaimed, exasperated. “I’m assuming you had figured that out already!”

Mr. de Worde made a slight noise that might have been a laugh’s attempt to escape, but he gave the appearance of complete innocence when Miss Cripslock turned to look at him. However, after a moment, Miss Cripslock herself grinned. Finally, de Worde broke the silence to bring the interview back on track. “One other matter, Miss Wright. I’ve seen some of the samples of your work. You… do understand that I’d be hiring you as a reporter, not an editorial writer, correct?”

Piper looked down at the desk, blushing lightly in embarrassment. “Yeah, I get that. And I, uhm… I’ve already been working on it.” She paused. “We… didn’t have anything established, so my sister and I kind of had to figure things out as we went along.”

William de Worde and Sacharissa Cripslock exchanged looks, and de Worde smiled. “I believe we can… empathize. Just… be willing to take criticism and incorporate feedback, and I believe we should be able to work together.”

Piper brightened. “So, I’ve got the job?”

“Yes.” Mr. de Worde smiled. “You’ve got the job. Welcome to the _Times_ , Miss Wright.”

* * *

In the Watch locker room, which was oddly mixed-gender - why was _this_ where Ankh-Morpork was making a weirdly progressive stand? - Valentine changed out of the ill-fitting uniform, breastplate, and crestless morion helm and into the bespoke tailored pants, shirt, tie, trenchcoat, and fedora that Lady Sybil had gifted him and locked up his uniform and armor in his locker. The lock was rather pathetic, he thought, but there was no point to getting a better one; all the lockers sprang open if you hit them the wrong way. Valentine made a mental note to start asking around with regards to apartments. He didn't want to run up a bill on Vimes’s tab with a hotel room, although Valentine might have wanted to, if Vimes was going to be there with him. He remembered curling up with him in their hotel room on Far Harbor.

Valentine had acquired a map and made his way back around to the Vimes estate on his own. It was interesting how few people actually saw him on the way there. Ankh-Morpork was a big city, and most folks were lost in their own troubles. Of the people who did see him, he was something uncomfortable, because he didn't fit neatly into any pre-made boxes, and they looked away. 

One woman shrilled at him that it was downright indecent that the dead were encroaching on the world of the living, and he’d smiled and said, “Madam, I'm only a digital ghost.”

That had confused her, and he’d kept walking. Several streets and turns later, a man demanded to know why a golem was wearing clothes, and Valentine had pointed out cheerily, “Probably because I’m not a golem, jackass!”

He wasn't, really. Valentine could see why Vimes had made that mistake - Vimes was stubborn and tended to cling onto ideas, but Valentine had met a few real golems at the main Watch House, and anatomical and acoustical differences aside, they were all _much_ nicer than Valentine was. 

Finally, there were people who seemed to be wholly unable to see Valentine at all, as if he was too foreign to their worldviews for their brains to parse, so they simply mentally edited him out.

At the Vimes estate, Valentine found that same backdoor he'd used earlier and found it locked. He supposed he could have just knocked, like a normal person in nice clothes who had, in fact, been invited to dinner, but given Vimes's own behavior in the Commonwealth - the time when they had wandered together through an unguarded back door into a Brotherhood of Steel camp came to mind - the man didn't have a leg to stand on if he objected to Valentine taking a little look-see first. The lock was child's play to pick, although a bright child like Shaun wouldn't have even found it play. He should have wondered more about why Vimes hadn’t sprung for a better lock when he could clearly afford one.

Valentine wandered around the ancient mansion. Many of the rooms were not in active use, with sheets draped over the furniture and thick, undisturbed dust coating them. Vimes and Sybil only had the one, now two boys, and while they certainly had servants, they in no way had enough people to actually fill this mansion in any meaningful sense. Valentine wondered what had happened. 

He found the trapdoor near the window ledge and found himself somehow unsurprised that Vimes had boobytrapped his home. Valentine moved a bit more carefully after that, finding a tripwire near a cellar and a snare on the second floor, but he wasn't careful enough, because he did trigger a thousand tiny ball bearings and fell over on his face with a clatter. 

So that was why Vimes hadn’t bought a better lock: to lull intruders into a false sense of security.

As he was getting up, he heard Vimes call, “Gertrude Steen, Lord Downey doesn't like you very much, does he?”

Vimes rounded the corner of the hallway, a crossbow with a nocked bolt at the ready, and took in the sight of Nick Valentine trying to get up off the floor amidst a thousand ball bearings. He covered his mouth, but Valentine could hear him laugh. Still snickering, Vimes put away the crossbow, held out a hand up, and said, “Nick, dinner’s the other way.”

“Uhm. Thanks,” said Valentine, finally back on his feet, as he let Vimes walk him through the maze-like mansion. “Who is that Gertrude Steen dame?”

“Oh, student Assassin,” Vimes said, as if he was speaking of something as commonly inconvenient as the Pre-War rain. “The Assassins’ Guild has taken me off the books, but they still send students to practice.”

The dining room was larger than any family of three, now four, needed. Codsworth and the important looking manservant whom Valentine had seen earlier both looked at Valentine as if he was some particularly interesting drowned rat that Vimes had dragged in, which meant that Codsworth had to queuing his behaviour off the human, because Valentine knew that Codsworth otherwise liked him well enough. The human manservant went to Nick and ahemed, “Your hat and coat.”

Valentine took the human servant in, in that instant, thinking - street fighter, low-profile crossbow tucked under that waistcoat, at least three knives and - and he relished the dawning realization on the man's face that he couldn't read Valentine back. It was the amber optics. People got hung up on them, and if they looked at his face at all, it was only to see the tattered edges. 

Vimes had been good at actually seeing Valentine’s expressions. 

Valentine let the butler/street fighter take his hat and coat. Self-conscious, he fiddled with his tie, which was real silk and hand-embroidered with an emblem he didn't yet know the meaning of but had resolved to learn. 

Lady Sybil swept over to Valentine and gave him a diplomatic hug and said, “Oh, don't you look nice!”

“Yes, I don't know why you would do that to him,” said Vimes, eyes narrowed. 

Valentine was sat down at the table, where there was a glass of sherry waiting for him. Both Shaun and young Sam looked excited to see him, and young Sam asked, “How do you like Ankh-Morpork, Mr. Valentine?”

Vimes was far on the other side of the table, with Shaun, young Sam, and Sybil between him and Nick, and he seemed to be intensely interested in his salad, which as far as Nick could tell, was boring even by salad standards. 

“Seems fine,” Valentine said, shrugging. It wasn't Diamond City, for good or for ill. He was also very carefully determined that he was going to be polite and respectful, however hurt and angry he felt inside. There were children here. 

“Have you seen the Tower of Art yet?” inquired young Sam. 

“Not close up,” admitted Valentine.

“The Temple of Small Gods?” said young Sam. 

“No, I'm - Nick was Catholic,” Valentine said. It was awkward. 

“Unseen University?” continued that youthful hope. 

“Just the bits we both saw this morning,” said Valentine. “But what I’m finding most pressing is finding an apartment I can afford on a Lance-Constable’s salary.” He tilted his head and looked at Vimes, who wouldn't look at him, and he rephrased slightly, “I _can_ afford an apartment on a Lance-Constable’s salary? I don't need a kitchen. I’d like more privacy than the Watch barracks.”

“It wouldn't be any trouble to put you up somewhere,” said Lady Sybil, and she seemed sincere. 

“You’ll be able to afford an apartment, especially if you aren't looking for a kitchen,” Vimes said, as if he had answered this question for many others. “I’d avoid the Shades, of course, but beyond that, I'm rusty on the apartment market, I'm afraid.”

“I’ll figure something out. I usually do,” said Valentine. “And Corporal Clair Brown has already offered to help go over the legal codes with me - really, mimes? - maybe she'll have some apartment recommendations.”

“Oh yes, mimes,” said Vimes, his expression stern. 

Valentine thought about the massive, empty mansion and asked, “Any relatives in town?”

“Only child,” Vimes said, and Sybil said, “Only surviving sibling.” Then Sybil asked, “Do you have any family, Mr. Valentine? My Sam had said something about you having a brother?”

“A brother, yes. DiMA,” Valentine admitted. “I think he's going to stay at the Unseen University for a while. The wizards have to check something about him. I’ll swing by and make sure he’s fine soon.”

“DiMA?” Somehow, Lady Sybil pronounced the capitals. Valentine was impressed. “We’ll have to have him over.”

Valentine groaned, “You really shouldn't.”

“Nonsense,” said Lady Sybil. “And Deacon…”

“I’m not so sure…” said Vimes.

“And Strong -”

“Dear, not a good idea,” said Vimes. 

“And of course, Piper and Nat,” continued Lady Sybil. 

“Worse,” said Vimes. “They're reporters.”

“Preston Garvey,” said Lady Sybil. 

“Actually, he's fine,” admitted Vimes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all still the same day. They arrived in the morning, Ankh-Morpork time, and it’s a very big day, what with getting settled into a whole new world.
> 
> Chapter 3, which will be posted tomorrow, contains sexually explicit material. If that's not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us next week with Chapter 4.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	3. The One Day of Sunshine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains sexually explicit content. It's only mildly sexually explicit content. Like, you could probably easily film it in a way that a movie version might still make PG rated guidelines, except that there's a female orgasm and Hollywood is backwards as heck. But still, sex. Feel free to skip and rejoin us with chapter 4.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_The One Day of Sunshine_

“Gods, how I missed you.”

Sybil settled Vimes down with her in their soft, expansive bed. Vimes hated the concept that he’d been broken down and remade from almost nothing at all5, but it seemed that Sybil, examining him, didn’t find any new scars. It almost seemed a rip-off; he should have had new scars, after all he’d gone through. Vimes supposed they were all on the inside, then, where her deft fingers couldn’t massage them until a little of the stiffness left and they softened.

Sybil was just the same, not a hair astray, no new burns, the fuzz of her close-cropped hair, the way she wore it under her wigs, soft under his fingers. The mingled scent of her perfume with the sulphur of dragons tingled his nostrils as he breathed her in, and Vimes ended up sobbing on her shoulder, blubbering over how much he’d missed her, how bleak existence had been when he’d thought she was gone, and how he was never, ever going to watch her die again. She held him tightly and kissed the top of his head and assured him that she had no plans of dying. Sybil hadn’t done it yet, now had she?

Gods, how he’d missed the slope of her breasts, with their dainty pink crowns that turned to sharp peaks in his mouth or under his fingers as he kissed, licked, sucked, stroked, and squeezed. He missed her hands down his spine, somehow unbroken after all these years. Vimes missed the soft expanse of her belly. He missed knowing her, and if he had a second chance to know her all over again, he wouldn’t waste a second of it.

Her thighs were warm under his hands, and his head found its place between, where the _real_ scent of her filled his nose and his mouth and he drank her like a drowning man, until she crested in waves that took her under and back up, radiant and pleased. Sybil was like the one day of sunshine that Ankh-Morpork autumn had to give. She smiled upon him, and he was home in her gaze. Sybil took him in and let him be lost in her until they found their way together.

“I love you, Sybil, my dear,” he murmured, in the end, feverish and slick with sweat. He buried his face down in a pillow, letting himself sink into the bed.

“I know, dear,” said Sybil, fondly. “You’re home. You’re safe.”

5 He’d actually been remade from a pile of broken surplus institutional chairs and some odd flavours of pizza, such as fig and sardine and banana and sushi and, of course, chocolate, which was a type of potato. Knowing this wouldn’t have helped any, but it might have explained to him why he couldn't eat pizza anymore without the peculiar sensation that he was committing cannibalism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	4. Unpacking * Sun-Follower * A Theory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Bitter Water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO1jCiAwIX4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=8&t=0s) by The Oh Hellos, and [Can We Still Be Friends](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKkPv8qu8Ws&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=8) byTodd Rundgren, and [Killing Me Softly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KpeCk6NyZU&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=9) by Lauryn Hill.
> 
> We decided that because chapter 3 is so short, we’d go ahead and give you guys chapter 4 today. We finally start getting past day 1 here. Have a blast.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Unpacking * Sun-Follower * A Theory_

Sybil was alive and had forgiven him. Vimes was home.

But he didn’t feel absolved.

Sybil drifted off to happy sleep, her soft snore of light sleep filling the air. Vimes couldn’t sleep. He’d missed her snoring, and now, he missed the sound of Valentine’s fans. Vimes felt sick and broken and dirty. He loved his wife; adored her, and she had shown him mercy he felt he did not deserve. He was home. They’d made love. So why did he want for Valentine to be lying on the other side of him, to hear her deepening snoring and the hum of servos?

Why did Vimes want both? What was wrong with him? He was supposed to be _fixed_. Vimes wasn’t supposed to still love Valentine.

For one thing, if he did love him, abandoning him in Ankh-Morpork was a horrible thing to do to anyone. It was what Ankh-Morpork did to its _enemies._ Gates open, it let them in to wander about and sold them stuff and then came and stole their boots once they were broke.

Longfellow was already gone, and he’d been a friend, of sorts. Vimes couldn’t bear losing Valentine. Valentine would leave him, of course. A good man would, and Valentine was, if not precisely a man, a good very male golem. But he might stay about in town, where Vimes could know that Valentine was alive, and Sybil’s suggestion that perhaps Valentine could join the Watch and Valentine’s apparent acceptance of that suggestion had eased a little of Vimes’s terror. Valentine would be around.

But perhaps not much longer. There were a thousand idiosyncrasies one could blunder into in Ankh-Morpork. He couldn’t have that on his battered excuse for a conscience. Sick with worry, Vimes slipped out of bed. Sybil’s heavy snoring, like the creak of a siege engine, told him that she was well asleep. He dressed, and he walked out into the night.

Ankh-Morpork never slept. The crowds in the street lessened a little but only a little. Valentine could be anywhere. He wasn’t at the Treacle Miners hostelry pub, where Carrot had purchased accommodation for the Companions. He wasn’t at the Yard, where Carrot had already pressed the Shilling upon him. Vimes had gargoyles everywhere, though, and Valentine was distinctive, when properly described. Finding him was the work of about an hour of walking and talking.

Vimes saw him down the road, surrounded by perhaps four thieves, and he tensed.

“So, do you boys want to show me your Guild badges?” asked Valentine, apparently unconcerned by being surrounded.

There were _erms_ and the shuffling of feet.

“Because I’m happy to walk you all back to the Thieves' Guild to retrieve your badges, if you’ve forgotten them,” Valentine said lightly.

Vimes crept along in the shadows under awnings, thinking, four of them...

One said, “Look here, you, I don’t need a badge, I’ve got this club, and I see exposed wiring, wire’s worth a fair kip -”

“Wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said Valentine, smiling very reasonably, flashing his metal teeth and lowering his voice as he lurched up a bit closer at the most threatening one, “I might have to eat your brains. And _then_ , ‘cos you sure aren’t using your brains to live, the Thieves' Guild would hang you up by your figgins for thieving without a license.”

“Bloody hells, Odile, I’m telling you, ganking a zombie ain’t worth it,” said one of the other ones.

Their courage broke, and they fled.

Vimes breathed a sigh of relief. Valentine swivelled and noticed him. Vimes’s mouth felt dry. He wanted to say, _I love you. Come home with me and lie by my side and let me fall asleep to the humming of your wires and be there in the morning and be Shaun’s second father that he’s missing._

But Sybil would leave him, and Vimes couldn’t bear that, and Valentine was too good to have any interest in a man who would have an affair. So instead, he said, awkwardly, “Oh. Nick. Hullo. You handled that… well. Carrot gave you some advice, I expect?”

“Sam,” Valentine said, narrowing his eyes.

“Of course, I wouldn’t pull that trick around ol’ Reg, he’d call that ‘cultural appropriation’, he would,” said Vimes, screwing up his face with thought as he tripped over the unfamiliar term.

Valentine’s gaze searched him, demanding an explanation for why Vimes was there. His grey lips, just full enough to be kissable, were set in a thin, angry line. He said coldly, “Unless you’re out here on some actual important business, you should be at home. Asleep. With your wife,” and turned on his heel and walked stiffly away.

Vimes called out, “Nick! Wait up, I - l… I’d like if we could still be friends.”

Valentine paused and half-turned. “Y’know, they say you can never be friends with your boss.”

“Uhm, I daresay we won’t have much day to day interaction on the job, and I won’t, er, meddle,” said Vimes. “You won’t need to worry about any accusations of favoritism.”

Valentine looked wistful. “Mmm. I’ll miss working with you, though. I’ll miss a lot of things.” He looked over at his departing would-be assailants. “Should we chase ‘em or anything?”

“No, if they were going to lay hands on you, I’m fine with the Thieves’ Guild getting them,” said Vimes. The Thieves’ Guild probably would catch them, too. “The more harmless unlicensed thieves, I’ll make a point of trying to catch, on account of it being safer for them that way.” He shook his head. “I know it’s all a bit mad, but it works. The city works, Nick. So…?”

“Friends. Hmm. What’dya do with your friends, anyway?” asked Valentine.

“Haven’t a clue,” admitted Vimes. “Can’t say I have many. Perhaps a game of cards?” He’d tried to play cards with the servants. That hadn’t gone over well. You couldn’t be friends with your boss...

Valentine laughed. “I can go in for cards, I guess. Sure. I’ll be your friend. Eventually. You have to understand, I’m feeling pretty low right now. But honestly… it’s not like I stopped being your friend at any point, once I started? We just… added other stuff.”

‘Other stuff’ which counted as some of that lot of things that Valentine would miss.

Vimes did feel a sliver of relief that Valentine had agreed to still be his friend. One could love a friend. “I… yes. I’m sorry, you know -”

“I know you’re sorry, but you still did the thing that you’re sorry about,” said Valentine. “Why are you out here, anyway?”

_I just wanted to make sure that you’re fine._ Vimes said, “Oh, I… go on patrols even when I’m not on patrol.”

“You do that in Ankh-Morpork, too? Not just the Commonwealth?” asked Valentine.

“Yes,” said Vimes, “when I can’t sleep.”

Valentine knew how often Vimes slept poorly. He sighed, “I can’t make you sleep, anymore, but you really ought to.”

Valentine could have made him sleep even now. Vimes counter-chided, “And you shouldn’t be out alone in the night. Not until you know Ankh-Morpork better.”

Valentine rolled his eyes. “How am I gonna get to know Ankh-Morpork better if I can’t know her in the dark? Night is when a city’s at her most honest.” He shook his head. “If I let you walk me back to the Yard, will you go sleep?”

“The Yard?” Vimes asked. “I know I had Carrot set you up at a hotel -”

“No need to waste your money, and I’ll find an apartment soon enough,” said Valentine.

Vimes paid out of pocket, when the Watch needed it, which meant that it was possible he was paying either way. “Yes, fine.”

* * *

The very next morning, Vimes had to strike a tenuous balance. He had to go inspect the garden after the Soul Cake Tuesday Duck had been there, because it was entirely possible that someone would break in, evade his traps, and poison the eggs. People had tried to harm his family before, and even if the power of the Delvers was not what it had been, he knew he was still on their hit list. In addition, he had to temporarily disable his collection of traps, because while young Sam had grown up around them, Shaun hadn’t, and Vimes didn’t want the tongue-lashing he’d get from Sybil if Shaun fell in a pit-trap. However, Vimes also had a meeting with the Patrician that morning, and he had to find and examine all the chocolate eggs before his meeting, or else the Patrician would make one of his cutting little remarks about timeliness.

Of course, if Vimes was on time, that bastard would make him wait thirty minutes. There was no winning.

He found the Soul Cake Tuesday Duck trapped in one of his beartraps. She quacked reproachfully at him as he teased the trap open carefully, and Vimes hissed, “I could have you on breaking and entering, I could. Littering, too!” He glanced over the poorly hidden chocolate eggs. “Possibly child abandonment? This is fowl play you’re up to, don’t think I don’t see it.”

She flapped away into the golden light of dawn, and Vimes sniffed, “I’ve got to get a duck-sized set of handcuffs.”

* * *

Shortly after assuring the safety of all the chocolate eggs in the garden, Vimes had to answer to the Patrician about those odd new people who had been pulled out of Hex, because of course he did. He suspected that the only reason he hadn’t had to answer for it yesterday was that Sybil was a keen negotiator.

"Commander Vimes. You've lived in this city your entire life. I'm sure you recall that business with the Moving Pictures." 

"Yes, sir." 

"And the carts." 

"Yes, sir." 

"And the dragon. I vaguely recall you having some involvement in that matter." 

"Yes, sir." 

"And then there was that music with rocks in business that we never did get to the bottom of..." 

"Yes, sir." 

"And keeping in mind all of that, you decided it was a good idea to turn a group of fictional characters real?" 

"No, sir." 

"No? But that's what you did, wasn't it?" 

"In a manner of speaking, sir." 

"In what manner of speaking, Commander Vimes?" 

"I made them real, but I didn't just decide to. They became real from interacting with me; it wasn't an active decision I made. But once I knew they were, there was no way in hell I was going to let them just... wink out of existence, sir. They were already real, and I made sure they stayed that way, because letting real people become unreal has got to be at least as bad for reality as the other way around!"

Vimes thought there was another word for making real people unreal: murder.

* * *

Work was almost just like Vimes had left it; he’d only been gone a few days, from the perspective of Ankh-Morpork. There was more paperwork on his desk than there’d been when he left. He had to actually read through and think about some of it before signing it. There was Valentine’s hiring slip. He paused a moment.

These days, Vimes had to admit that policing wasn’t a bad job. It had its dangers, but frankly, Harry King’s boys had a more dangerous time of it, and the Watch had Igorina as a medical benefit. He was, he also had to admit, frankly unsure if Igorina was the Igor that he’d hired or if Igorina was a new Igor that Carrot had hired. Certainly, being a Watchman was better than being a private inspector like Lewton, chasing down blackmail money from nobles.

The paperwork said that Valentine had apparently successfully argued himself out of any training at the Lemonade Factory and was starting as a Lance-Constable on a month of night traffic duty. Watchmen almost always started with a month of nights. It was traditional, insofar as the City Watch was building its own traditions. Valentine probably could have successfully argued himself into starting as a Sergeant; he certainly could have, if Vimes had written him the right letter to Carrot, but… Vimes couldn’t do that, could he? No, he couldn’t show any favouritism to Valentine, not even to get him off that month of traffic duty, which would probably drive the poor dear batty.

Vimes thought about looking over Pessimal’s reports on which duties encountered the most and least hazardous conditions and briefly contemplated accidentally on purpose having Valentine assigned to whatever was the least dangerous. Did they have a laying-down-quietly-in-the-cellar-all-day rotation? But no, Vimes couldn’t do that, either. All he could do was worry.

Was this at all how Sybil felt about him?

Another piece of paper told Vimes that Detritus had hired Strong. He was just going to trust Detritus on that.

Vimes dug through mountains of paperwork, and if they’d been real mountains, he would have done a dwarf proud. He sat through meetings. He went home, and he listened to young Sam read to him, and Shaun also wanted to get in on it. He had dinner, which was the same salad as yesterday because Sybil said that it needed eating up.

Then Vimes and Sybil settled in to unpack his effects from the Commonwealth, because Sybil had a good filing system and believed in never throwing away anything that might be of use. They’d already sent for the set of Vim! power armour that the wizards had pulled out of the game, because as Vimes pointed out, that was _his_. 

First off, Sybil asked gently about the odd piece of armour that Vimes had strapped to his left arm. He blinked. “Oh. That’s my Pip-Boy. It’s like a Dis-organiser. I suppose I’ve just gotten used to wearing it.”

“Can it remind you about appointments?” Sybil inquired.

“Erm, probably,” admitted Vimes, who made a mental note to ask Shaun how the Pip-Boy did that. Shaun was much better with the Pip-Boy than Vimes was.

Then they went through his backpack, and after Vimes pulled out nine artillery smoke grenades, three bottlecap mines, three cryogenic grenades, a flare gun, and thirty-six fragmentation grenades, Sybil commented, “Sam, love, that’s a Bag of Holding you’ve got there.”

Vimes shrugged and proceeded to pull out seventeen more fragmentation mines, a walking cane, and ten molotov cocktails. “It doesn’t have unlimited storage. Just unreasonable storage.”

“Still. Do you have any idea how expensive those are?” asked Sybil.

Vimes hazarded a guess. Sybil shook her head. Vimes squeaked, “More?” She nodded. Vimes felt faint.

Sybil declared, “This backpack of yours is going to be a family heirloom, that’s for certain.”

Vimes sorted his growing pile of weapons into weapons that he was going to personally dispose of, weapons that he’d keep about the house In Case, properly locked up, of course, weapons that he’d donate to the Watch, and weapons to donate to the Armory. The nuclear mine was going to be disposed of, although he reckoned that he’d need Shaun’s help with that. Disarming thermonuclear devices was a father-son bonding activity, right? If they failed, their atoms wouldn’t be so much bonded as fused, though… Among the pile of weapons were some shishkebab saws, which Sybil then sorted into a Housewares pile, commenting that their chef had a quite good Ephebian chicken recipe that could be done as shishkebabs.

The fusion cores were all dumped in a single box labelled ‘fusion cores’.

His armour and Commonwealth clothing went into similar piles of keep and donate, either to the Watch or the Armory. The hazmat suit would specifically go to Cheery. The Silver Shroud costume could go to the boys as a plaything. 

The spare wedding ring, Vimes clutched tightly in his hand, rubbing up against that scar on his palm, that scar that he didn’t remember getting. He thought about how, if that ring belonged anywhere, it belonged on Valentine’s finger, and he put it away, unable to meet Sybil’s eyes.

The addictol, Nuka-Cola, Nuka-Cherry, Nuka-Cola Quantum, Nuka-Cola Quartz, Rad-X, RadAway, robot repair kits, stimpaks, Vim!, Vim! Captain’s Blend, Vim! Refresh, and Ware’s Brew, he was giving to Cheery to reverse-engineer. He did reserve a few of the robot repair kits to keep about the house for Codsworth’s needs. Several stimpaks would be kept around the house; Sybil kept dragons, and Vimes kept interesting enemies. He kept the Stealth Boys for himself. The blood packs, glowing and otherwise, could go to Igorina; Sybil gave him a funny look over those. 

Bubblegum, corn, Cram, Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, mirelurk meat, mole rat meat, mutt chops, noodle cup, poached angler, purified waters, radscorpion egg omelettes, radscorpion steaks, ribeye steaks, roasted mirelurk meat, salisbury steak, squirrels on sticks, stingwing filets, tarberries, yao guai ribs, and yao guai roasts were going into the larder. In a bewildered tone, Sybil said, “Well. How very… ethnic. This all needs eating up. I daresay we shan’t need to send the servants on a grocery run for a month, though we might do with the addition of some greens.” She looked at Vimes reproachfully as if he had failed to bring home greens from the Commonwealth on purpose to spite her.

There was an unopened bottle of something called bourbon, which looked like whiskey. Sybil didn’t ask about that. She knew.

Then they went through an assortment of reports, holo-tapes, and keys. Sybil was bewildered by the dozens of hair grips that Vimes had in his bag and turned them over in her hands, asking, “Dear, what are these?”

“Really naff lockpicks, apparently,” said Vimes, who didn’t know what hair grips were for. They’d never been invented in Ankh-Morpork.6

Sybil adjusted her short wig, the one that she used when the full chestnut mane wasn’t required but she still wanted a wig, which had become dislodged by all the work of sorting. She looked thoughtfully at the hairpin in her hand and teased it through the band of her wig, pinning it down in place. She said, “They’re good for hair, these Sammie pins of yours.”

“Sammie pins?” Vimes groaned.

“Yes, why not?” said Sybil, shrugging, as she helped herself to another handful and made a note to contact a gel she knew who was in the pin industry. 

The assorted electronics that Vimes had accumulated, including the Courser chip and the cybernetic limb actuator, he was giving to Shaun, who liked that sort of thing. The books were sorted and would be added to their family library. The Mother icon, Sybil insisted on adding to the family shrine. Vimes wasn’t religious, but Sybil was, to a normal extent, anyway. She honoured Io and Offler and Hoki and Anoia and Bahama Mama7 and all those as was appropriate. The remaining cigars, he tucked into his silver cigar case, which had been safe at home all along, because it hadn’t fit in the ridiculous dragon outfit that he’d worn to that horrible party. 

Sybil looked over his clothing and examined his socks, thumbing the heels. She asked absently, “Who darned these for you?”

Vimes felt hot under his collar. He’d confessed to Sybil about his affair, but that was just intercourse. Socks were serious business. Still, there was nothing for it. He admitted, “Nick did.”

Sybil inhaled and let it out slowly. She observed, “He really was quite serious about you, wasn’t he?”

“Nick’d planned on asking me to marry him. I overheard him talking to Pastor Clements,” Vimes said reluctantly.

“Why would he do such a thing?” Sybil asked quickly, scandalized.

Vimes felt defensive and insisted, “Men marrying men was perfectly Cultural there!”

Sybil raised a hand in allowance and said, “That might be, but as the ranking man, _you_ ought to have been asking _him_.”

Vimes stared. “Uhm?”

“Do you really think it’s appropriate for a common citizen to propose to a Duke?” said Sybil sternly. She could be oddly old-fashioned, but in this case, Vimes had no idea which catalogue she’d found this fashion in.

“One, yes, if they’re both interested in each other, and two, he didn’t know I was a Duke. He didn’t even know I was Commander of the Watch,” said Vimes.

“I suppose,” Sybil sniffed. They both paused. Then she asked, “If he’d asked, what would you have told him?”

“Yes,” said Vimes, without much thought. He’d already worked himself through his decision on that matter.

Sybil looked at him.

“What? We were good partners together, I’d moved in with him, we were raising Shaun together -” Vimes started, and he was going to conclude that he did love Valentine, but Sybil interrupted him.

“You were raising Shaun _together_?” Sybil asked. She was, perhaps, familiar with the concept of nobility, on occasion, enjoying same sex lovers. The thing about them was that, when a noble tired of them, they didn’t even need to pay the Assassins’ Guild to get rid of them; in the recent past, they could have their male lovers hung for free on the city’s dime. The concept of two men settling down to raise a child together, however, was uncharted water for Sybil.

“Yes? Nick was a good father,” Vimes said sadly, feeling rather guilty. If someone had taken his boy away from him… well… he knew exactly what would happen and how it would end in a nuclear bang. Valentine was being remarkably sober about it all.

Sybil looked troubled. After a while, she said, “Oh. That explains a little about some of Shaun’s behaviour and some of the… redactions in his speech. Oh.”

Vimes nodded and hung his head. Sybil held him. She said firmly, “And I told you that we ought to have Mr. Valentine around as a role model for Shaun.” She had. “You ought to have told me that he was like a father to our Shaun. We’ll have to make sure that he stays in touch. It’d be cruel to Shaun to do anything else.”

_What about cruel to **me**?_ Vimes thought, because he wanted Valentine around, yes, he wanted to know that Valentine was alive, yes, but… it hurt, being near Valentine and seeing Valentine hurting and not being able to do a bloody thing about it, knowing that he was the cause of that pain.

6 Hair grips, or bobby pins, were invented after World War I in Roundworld.

7 Goddess of dragons, island paradises, and sausages.

* * *

Most of the keys went into a drawer that Sybil had for spare keys. Even without locks, keys could come in useful. One key, though, Vimes palmed, and as he was taking some of the longer-lasting foods down to the cellars, he took it out and looked at it again. The launch key fit uneasily into his hand as he wrapped his head around its story.

Before the fallen Commonwealth, the land had been large and round, with many mighty nations, who had been possessed of the mechanical equivalents of wizards’ magic meteor swarms, the sort thrown around during the Mage Wars. They had gone to war, as nations did when politicians failed to serve the people. The people of the Commonwealth thought that a kingdom called China had started the War. 

The _USS Democracy_ was an odd Naval vessel, sabotaged by her own Captain to prevent a retaliatory strike. Captain Arnold Wabash died preventing the launch key from falling into hands that would use it. Vimes thought he would have shaken that man’s hand, if Wabash had been both real and alive. The launch key would activate the _Democracy_ ’s nuclear missiles. The Children of Atom would have used the launch key for their own religious self-immolation.

Now the launch key was just a key. 

_It is the symbol of vengeance denied._

Vimes could have easily borrowed one of Sybil’s dragons with a hot flame and melted the launch key to slag, but it was just a key. There was no _USS Democracy_ here, no nuclear missiles. The key was impotent. Vimes pulled up the cunningly concealed loose concrete slab in his cellar and hid the key in his vault, next to the Burleigh & Stronginthearm Piecemaker Mark IX, which was a small, foldable crossbow that made no noise when shot and could be easily concealed within a pocket. The illegal, deadly crossbow appeared to still be in order. The fletching on its small supply of bolts even looked new.

* * *

As Vimes was preparing to take young Sam and Shaun out trickle-treating, Codsworth, who had been assigned to the door duty of passing out the traditional treacle gobstoppers, announced that Miss Piper Wright and little Miss Nat Wright were asking of Master Vimes.

Young Sam, like his mother, was dressed as a dragon. Sybil seemed to assume that Vimes had contrived to lose his own dragon costume to personally slight her. 

_Yes dear, I absolutely put myself through the wringer for a year stuck in an icono-game thinking you were dead just so I could lose my dragon costume,_ was something Vimes carefully did not say. He was wearing his blue Vault suit, along with his Pip-Boy, because it looked ridiculous and had to count as some form of penance. When he’d been a lad, if you were very lucky, your mum would let you wear a sheet over your head. Not a sheet with eyes cut in it, mind, because a good sheet was worth more than you were. You’d just have to hope for the best that you didn’t walk off a bridge.

Vimes wished Valentine could have come along. He wouldn’t have even needed a costume. Vimes knew exactly where Valentine was, though, and that was working Night Watch on traffic duty.

Shaun had decided to put on the Silver Shroud outfit, though Sybil had to pin it all over to take it in to keep it from falling off him and dragging on the ground. He’d commented, “I wasn’t supposed to, but sometimes, I could pick up the radio broadcasts about the Silver Shroud from Goodneighbour. Did you ever have adventures like the Silver Shroud?”

“Probably not,” said Vimes gloomily. He didn’t have adventures. Adventures were for heros, not Watchmen. He had loosely connected strings of intractable crises.

“Oh, hmm. Well, ‘Death Becomes You’ was really good,” said Shaun, disappointed.

He rounded down to the front door, where there was Piper, who was wearing a skirt over her pants, and she greeted, “Blue! I knew you had a Vault suit!”

“Blue?” Sybil asked.

“Because he’s a Vault dweller. They all wear blue like that,” said Piper, looking self-satisfied in finally being proven right that Vimes possessed a Vault suit.

Vimes explained, “So, when the world was destroyed by magic -”

“Nuclear war,” Piper interjected.

“Magic, nuclear war, whatever, some people were placed in these underground safehouses for their protection, and we had to wear blue because…” Vimes paused. He had no idea why they had to wear blue. “...anyway, I was frozen. For two hundred years?”

“You’re still very fresh, sir. Not a hint of freezer-burn,” said Codsworth, encouragingly.

Sybil looked carefully at Piper and Codsworth as Vimes explained about the Vault, as if trying to discern whether her husband was saying something that he had actually perceived as happening to him in the context of the icono-game or if he was engaging in hallucinatory rambling. She seemed to be more disturbed by the possibility that Vimes really had experienced the sensation of being frozen for two centuries.

“Anyway, Blue, this whole Soul Cake Tuesday business, this is… pretty much Halloween?” said Piper.

“Piper, I don’t know what Halloween is!” Vimes protested. “Look, there’s a bloody duck, and she breaks in and hides chocolate eggs in the garden -”

“Is that why we found egg-shaped Fancy Lads Snack Cakes in the green mould growing in the corner of our apartment?” asked Nat, as Codsworth foisted upon her some treacle gobstoppers.

“ _Maybe_.” Did green mould count as a garden? Vimes didn’t feel qualified to answer that question. “So you’ve got to wear a posy of primroses on account of Tradition. Then there’s rolling eggs down the Tump.” Sybil had taken young Sam and Shaun, while Vimes had been waylaid with paperwork at work. “There might be Morris dancing, if you’re unlucky. Then there’s trickle-treating, where you dress up in costumes and go mooch treacle gobstoppers off your neighbours, only these days, some folks hand out other things, because they think treacle’s boring or suchlike.” When Vimes had been young, he’d been happy to get a treacle gobstopper that had only been sucked on by two other people before him. He rubbed his chin. “Though I suppose toffee rats are Cultural, in the dwarf neighbourhoods. Oh, it’s also the start of duck hunting season.”

“Okay, okay…” said Piper, thinking, “...but where do the Soul Cakes come into it?”

“...don’t know,” Vimes mumbled, and he looked over at Sybil for help.

Sybill kindly supplied, “Oh, in the old days, we’d give soul cakes to the poor so that they would pray for our dead.”

“Sounds like bribery,” Vimes hazarded.

“Well,” Sybil noted dryly, “trickle-treating is a dressed up sort of extortion.”

Vimes couldn’t argue with that. If the treacle gobstoppers or an equivalent candy were not proffered, then what resulted was… trickle.

Meanwhile, Nat was looking Shaun over and said, “Aren’t you a bit short to be the Silver Shroud?”

“This is just a disguise. I’m much taller in real life,” said Shaun.

“Are not,” said young Sam, who was fully aware of Shaun’s height. They’d marked it on the other side of the door to their bedroom, across from where young Sam’s heights were marked.

“I think I got it. Thanks for explaining, Blue.” said Piper. She looked to Nat. “We’ll get it next year. Just didn’t have enough time this year, what with the… move.”

The human brain was remarkable, in the miracles that it would down-play, understate, and outright shove under the rug.

Sybil ahemed, “Sam, dear, if you would introduce me properly to your… friends?”

“Oh, er, right, Miss Piper Wright and Miss Nat Wright, of Diamond City, the Commonwealth,” said Vimes. Then he sighed. “Her Grace, Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna Ramkin Vimes, The Duchess of Ankh.”

Sybil smiled, “And now that you are acquainted, why don’t you come with us? We were just about to head out, but I’m sure that we could lend you something…”

Nat’s eyes rather lit up, and Sybil produced from the attic a Valkyrie costume that Sybil had worn as a girl. The shield, sword, and axe were all real. The Ramkins took arming their children very seriously. It required a bit of creative pinning to get it to stay on, but soon, Nat was ready to stalk off into the night to retrieve the souls of the slain and a bag of candy.

As for Piper, Vimes merely reminded her that she still had the Robes of Atom's Devoted.

As they started the trek around the neighbourhood as a convoy of five, Piper commented, “This is a nice neighbourhood.”

“It’s not nice. It’s just rich. The people are t…” Vimes wanted to say ‘tossers’, but he felt Sybil’s gaze on him, reminding him that there were children here. Ah, but what else started with ‘t’? “Tax evaders. Mostly. I paid mine.”

When Vimes had gone trickle-treating, parents hadn’t walked with their children. His own mum had too much work to do, and folks assumed that children could look after themselves. Children just went about in gangs, sometimes literally gangs. Vimes had done certain things with eggs… Now, though, of course Vimes was walking with his son and… his other son, because while children could largely look after themselves, and his young Sam was shaping up to have a wicked left elbow that Vimes was very proud of, sometimes folks did snatch children. They always had. Cynically, he imagined that they always would, and he wouldn’t be having with any of that on his watch.

No.1 Scoone Avenue was a Bloody Stupid Johnson and, as, such, was entirely upside down, with only the cellars aboveground. Nonetheless, the Lowells lived there. The Lowells only talked to the Cabots, which was fine by Vimes; he didn’t _want_ to talk to the Lowells. Lady Lowell, who was supervising one of her servants handing out treacle gobstoppers peered down her nose at Vimes’s little party of five and said imperiously, “Are you bringing charity cases into the neighbourhood? Bad enough that the children draft up their little battlemaps of which neighbourhoods give the best candy without you meddling in it, sirrah.”

“I expect your lawyers will claim it as a deduction whether I do or don’t, so why shouldn’t I?” said Vimes brightly.

Then there were the Cabots, who only talked to the Gods. Young Lady Cabot, the eldest daughter of the household, was sitting there idly winging gobstoppers at her servant, and she demanded, “And what even are you lot supposed to be? Hobos?”

“I am a Spike-Nosed Regal; you can tell by the conformation of the wouters,” Sybil explained smoothly.

“I’m a Silver Regal. They’re pop’lar in Sto Lat,” said young Sam.

“I’m the Silver Shroud! When death comes for evil doers, I am its shroud!” said Shaun, as if he was paraphrasing something.

“And then I carry off the souls of the slain,” said Nat. She waved her sword speculatively, in a fashion that seemed to say, if she couldn’t find pre-made slain, she might make her own, if the candy was not forthcoming.

“Right, I’m just a Vault dweller,” said Vimes.

“If you meant you’re the sort of crawling thing with too many legs that lives under a rock…” started Lady Cabot.

“I’m a cultist,” said Piper.

“Oh, which god?” said Lady Cabot, with interest. The Cabots owned many priests.

“Uh, Atom?” said Piper. “Yeah. Glory to Atom!”

“Haven’t heard of Atom yet,” said Lady Cabot, speculative. “Can you get him with the God of the Month Club?”

“Absolutely,” said Vimes, smiling unpleasantly.

As they walked away, the children’s bags somewhat heavier, Sybil gave Vimes a mild look.

At the Pontefracts’, their horrible slavering mastiff was enjoying a treacle gobstopper of his own. The elderly Lord Pontefract, who was supervising his candy-distributing servant by continually kicking him, looked at Vimes’s two boys and sniffed disdainfully, “Ye gods, man, you putting your poor lady wife through another pregnancy at her age...”

“You do know children aren’t born ten years old?” Sybil said gently.

“And that’s the trouble these days, children not even putting in the effort to be adults, thinking they can get by being babies. Bah, the workhouse with all of them…” rambled on Lord Pontefract.

As they walked away, Vimes asked Piper, “Still think it’s a nice neighbourhood?”

“You’re right; it’s like snots in the Upper Stands,” Piper admitted.

Another neighbour had done the math, realized that Vimes and Sybil had married about eleven years ago and that any ten year old who looked like both of them would be… a perfectly legitimate child of theirs, likely conceived after their wedding. So why had the Vimes covered him up, demanded their neighbour? Was the boy simple?

“No. He’s not simple. He’s extremely complicated. But if he’d been simple, I wouldn’t have covered him up,” Vimes said flatly. “Now, you might want to cover yourself up, but that would be your own business.” 

Someone else assumed that they’d adopted to cover up for a relative who had ended up in a bad way with an extra child they couldn’t look after, which would have been a reasonable theory, which was rapidly made unreasonable by taking one look at the surviving members of the Ramkin-Vimes family tree.

There were insinuations of mistresses and misters, which made Vimes feel guilty, and he was glad of the dark of the night to cover his blushing.

One neighbour had made it most of the way through the newspaper article but had gotten bored before the end and had concluded that Shaun was a Changeling made of wood. The Fair Folk did that sort of thing.

* * *

Moist von Lipwig hadn’t grown up with trickle-treating. His parents belonged to the Plain Potato Church. Besides, in Uberwald, strangely-dressed folks coming around trying to get a foot in the door at night were probably vampires, although treacle gobstoppers might have worked a treat to gum up their fangs. He wasn’t handing out treacle gobstoppers, though. Those were the past, a relic of Ankh-Morpork’s mining days. No, he was handing out candyfloss stamps: You Can’t Lick Them (Well, Actually You Can), chocolate dollar notes, and little marzipan trains. Children from as far as the suburbs had put his house on their hit list. Families had taken trains just to add his holiday charity to their bags, hah!

Advertising. People willingly walked to his house, in the dark, to be advertised at.

Now Adora, she just wanted to give each and every child a crossbow bolt, preferably at speed, but that sort of thing tended to fluster… ah, there he was.

“Commander Vimes! And your intrepid band of…” Moist looked at them. He could recognise Lady Sybil and young Sam, and he’d actually read the newspaper, which meant that he was able to pick out Miss Piper Wright, Miss Natalie Wright and… young Sam? The resemblance was uncanny, there. Now there was the story, of course, which was in the paper, which didn’t make it true, just true enough for the masses, that the Commander had been trapped in an icono-game and days had passed like months and that he had somehow made some of the characters from the game real, including a slightly older copy of his son. It was a fantastic story. No one would believe it, which meant that Moist expected he was supposed to believe it, because no one would lie about something so far-fetched.

But well, Moist would.

So he didn’t believe it, but he’d be polite about it.

“You know my lady wife, you’ve seen young Sam,” although Vimes’s tone suggested that he wished Moist hadn’t, “our other boy is Shaun, and then there are Miss Piper Wright and Miss Nat Wright, of Diamond City, in the Commonwealth.”

That was what the paper said, more or less. The Commonwealth wasn’t on any map. Moist had checked. Moist flipped a chocolate dollar around between his fingers and said, “Moist von Lipwig. Congratulations on your addition to the family. Always charmed to meet any friends of our Commander, here. Now tell me, does this Commonwealth have paper money?”

“We used bottle caps,” admitted Piper.

And Moist said, “Interesting...”

But Adora had seen who was at the door, and her cloud of smoke heralded her arrival. She glared at Vimes. “The paper says you’ve got a flying squid golem that’s only 200 years old.”

“210, but who’s counting,” Vimes muttered. “I suppose Codsworth’s not exactly a golem, but he’s free, and I’m paying him, and you can check on him if you like.”

“And those two… clockwork… things, they’re definitely not golems,” Adora said, squinting angrily.

“No. They’re just artificial beings who run off words in their heads, made to do the bidding of humans. Nothing at all like golems,” said Vimes.

“I won’t have them besmirching the good name of golems,” Adora said threateningly.

“I shouldn’t worry about it. Mr. Valentine seems like a perfectly lovely person,” said Sybil. 

* * *

When they were done, Piper and Nat seemed to know the way back to their apartment, and Vimes took down the number, offering that if Piper wanted to learn an interesting assortment of specialist’s blows that Vimes definitely didn’t know, to check with Sybil when his calendar was free. Then Vimes sat down to sort young Sam and Shaun’s candy. There were no _random_ cases of children being poisoned by Soul Cake Tuesday candy, none that could be substantiated. There had been, however, a case of a father who’d poisoned his son’s candy to murder the boy and had then put poison in the candy of his daughter and a few of their friends to cover it up and make it look random. There were cases like that, all right, of targeted murders with splash damage. Such crimes happened more in the affluent neighbourhoods. In the Shades, oh, the children might find some severed fingers in their sacks of candy, which always excited the Igor children, but there wouldn’t be any embedded needles or razorblades. Needles and razorblades were too expensive to waste on annoying brats when a thrown half-brick would do the job just as well.

Detritus always worried that someone was going to drug the rock candy that the troll children favoured, on the logic that, one hit and they’d be hooked, but no one went around wasting street drugs on pebbles, especially when they wouldn’t even know what dealer to go to for more, if the drugs turned up anonymously in their candy sacks. No, that legend had started, as near as Vimes could tell, when young pebble Anyolite had gotten into his uncle Schist’s supply of Scrape, overdosed, and died. To cover it up, the family had dumped Scrape over his candy and tried to blame the holiday treats. Cheery had a devil of a time untangling that forensic geology.

But the Deepdowners had already tried to kill his Sybil and his young Sam, so Vimes checked the candy, and if it was a sort of candy that wasn’t particularly tasty or he saw that young Sam and Shaun had more than one of it, he’d check it personally.

Sybil, for her part, then sorted the candy into little daily portions, which meant that young Sam and Shaun would have candy rationed out for weeks to come, although not much on any given day. Moderation, she said, and what Vimes heard was that they wouldn’t have to put up with young Sam and Shaun running and shouting all night long on a sugar high.

Shaun already seemed a bit of an insomniac, though. The Vimes curse.

* * *

Constable Garnock Anvilfoot was showing Lance-Constable Valentine the ropes. Granted, Lance-Constable Valentine gave the impression of being quite an experienced Watchman to begin with, and Anvilfoot couldn't help wondering to himself why Valentine hadn't negotiated for a higher starting rank when he transferred from... wherever he had transferred from, but that was between Lance-Constable Valentine and the administration, and Anvilfoot wasn't going to pry. 

Of course, even an experienced copper had to be taught the peculiarities of being on traffic duty in Ankh-Morpork, and that meant taking Valentine around to meet the traffic cameras and gargoyles. The newcomer seemed a little surprised when Anvilfoot opened the first camera, introduced him to the imps, and left them with a few pellets of food. He thought he heard the Lance-Constable murmur something, "Well, I guess that explains a lot," but it had been faint enough that Anvilfoot wasn't sure Valentine knew he had spoken out loud. He had also seemed a bit surprised at the first gargoyle, but despite the surprise he was actually much better about addressing them as people than most new Watchman. In fact, it didn't take long before the Lance-Constable could understand the gargoyles better than Anvilfoot himself could. Granted, Anvilfoot wasn't working in his native language, but he wasn't certain Valentine was, either. Certainly, he spoke Morporkian in an accent that was new to the dwarf.

They had just finished chatting with Cresting-Over-God-Street and were heading towards the next spot. "Not really sure whether it was Mister Vimes or Captain Ironfoundersson who first came up with the idea, just know it happened pretty early in the Watch's reformation. But you know, way they figured, gargoyles are all about the city on top of the buildings, and they're all perfectly happy just staring at one spot all day, so one of 'em thought maybe they'd be willing to tell us what they were seeing. Turns out they were, so long as you paid 'em in pigeons."

"Pigeons, huh?"

"Yeah. They don't have much use for coin or paper money."

Valentine cast an amused glance back towards Cresting and murmured, "And he thought bottlecaps were a strange currency."

"Well, I mean... I'm not sure what you're referencing, but bottlecaps are..." Anvilfoot paused as a rider on a white horse rode past. He touched his helm and said, respectfully, "Good evening, your lordship."

GOOD EVENING, OFFICERS, replied the rider politely, and it was at that point that the Lance-Constable performed a double-take. 

The rider was already gone, but the newer Watchman stared after it, his eerie, glowing eyes wide. "Wha- who was that?!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, just Death," Anvilfoot replied casually. "You'll spot him from time to time in this line of work." He frowned up at the Lance-Constable. "What, you didn't have Death where you came from?"

"Well of course we had death, we just didn't... I never saw..." he gestured in the general direction that the white horse had gone. "How is he even here?"

"Probably arrived on that horse," replied Anvilfoot solemnly, taking the question at its literal face-value as dwarfs tended to. "Probably means some poor fool's in for it." Then he shrugged and started walking again. "Or he's in the area for take-out."

"Death... eats take-out?" Valentine asked as he stopped staring and turned to catch up with Anvilfoot. It didn't take long, what with the longer legs.

"Yeah," Anvilfoot agreed. "I hear his favorite curry place is nearby."

* * *

Not long ago, not far away, there had been an end. The witches had slaughtered the invading elves, and the King of the elves had gathered up his people in the palm of his hand and taken them away, snapping one of the great links between the Disc and the parasite dimension known as Fairyland. For now, the time of iron had returned. For now, the time of the elves was gone.

However, elves were not like old-fashioned vampires, to count every grain of rice spilling through their fingers. Heliotrope had been left behind. He was not smart. He was in fact, very stupid, in the way of elves, but he was cunning, and cunning told him that no more pleasure could be had in staying near where witches dwelled. The witches these days remembered too much, too well.

The railroad tracks constrained the ways he could wander. The passing trains, iron moving fast over iron, left needle tracks through his mind, tearing his perception of the landscape. Elves use the love that iron has for iron to navigate, as sharks use electromagnetic fields in the ocean, and they’re used to always knowing where they are and always knowing where their prey is. When a train went by, Heliotrope ceased to know where he was and would very nearly cease to know who _he_ was. He’d have to have a lie down, his head pounding and eyes tearing, and there was always a chance that he would wake up and be someone else entirely. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Heliotrope continued to be Heliotrope. There were worse people he could be, but they were mainly very, very rich.

There was one train that did not vex him as the others did as she thundered by. One train was made of something other than iron. Heliotrope didn’t know what the metal was. Knowing about metals was for craftsmen that the elves enslaved. Elves didn’t clutter up their minds with that kind of knowledge. There was a reason, though, why elves had always pushed the nonferromagnetic metals, the mithrils, the adamantiums, on unwary adventurers. When those metals were popular, an elf could get away with a great deal more.

Heliotrope pulled aside one of the train’s passengers when she departed at a stop, and he pulled the knowledge out of her head: the train was _Iron Girder_ , but despite the name, she was made of sorortanium, called the sister of iron. The train had quite a following. Indeed, the human thought of the train as other humans thought of gods. He took the human’s money and her possessions, and eventually, when she grew boring, he took her life, and he continued on.

All roads led away from Ankh-Morpork, but some people walked them backwards.

Heliotrope, be migraine’d and blinking, stumbled into Ankh-Morpork some weeks after he’d been left behind, and he discovered something interesting. Ankh-Morpork had at least 50,000 dwarfs and more trolls than the hills, old races with long memories, and it had goblins, oh it had goblins, those forgotten wretches of Fairyland, and yet, Ankh-Morpork had done something to them: it had made them forget.

Dwarfs and trolls would mob someone from Llamedos, someone they thought looked ‘elvish’, but they’d do it in a back alley. Heliotrope could watch it from where a main street intersected that back alley, and they didn’t see him at all. His glamour worked. He was just a human to them. dwarfs and trolls still hated elves, they remembered that much, but city-life had made them forget what elves were. Elves weren’t that fair-haired druid, fresh off the train from Llamedos, carrying with him nothing but a harp and hopes and dreams. No, elves were the people who suggested to the dwarfs and trolls that they throw the first rock, turn that fair hair red with blood.

And the goblins, the goblins were too busy just trying to be accepted to trouble Heliotrope.

It was delightful, slamming iron headache or not.

It had been said that the first of any species to arrive at Ankh-Morpork joined the Watch, but that aphorism had already been broken, and Heliotrope had no interest in making the acquaintance of those guards in mismatched helmets. Avoiding them took some of his guile but only a little. There were barely three hundred of them, and the city seethed with over a million people. The Guilds had their own regulatory forces, but Heliotrope quickly found out how to make that arrangement work for him.

Every day, unlicensed musicians came to Ankh-Morpork, hoping to make their break. The Musicians’ Guild would quickly step in, and there were consequences for unlicensed musicians. Often, those consequences involved breaking. In the smoky dive bars of the Shades, it wasn’t hard to find musicians no one would miss, and elves thought they loved musicians, though anyone who knew both love and what elves did with musicians would say that those two things were quite separate.

Heliotrope had gotten bored with his last plaything, a clever young zither player, and so he’d pulled out all her blood vessels in a line to see if she could play those pulsing, spurting strings. Disappointingly, she hadn’t been up to it. He’d dumped the body out the window of a second story loft.

Then it had been Soul Cake Tuesday, and Heliotrope had gone about spoiling children rotten with sweeties. Elves thought they liked children. Elves thought they’d never hurt a child. Elves never had to be the bleary parents of a child strung out on fifty pomegranate-flavoured white chocolate candies shaped like skeletons, a child who’d graffiti’d a troll and had broken every dish in the flat and was rolling around in the dish-sherds, refusing to sleep.

Then Heliotrope’d gone and spoiled all the dairy in the kitchen at the Royal Opera because he’d found _Miserable Les_ boring.

That had been fun.

He was going to have to find a new plaything soon, though.

* * *

Deacon took his time getting to know the city, mainly from the underground. Ankh-Morpork was built on Ankh-Morpork, and that had given it an impressive undercity. The dwarfs had resettled quite a bit of the underground, but there were reaches even they hadn’t found. It gave him some time to better figure out how his ability to switch between different outfits worked. Deacon had it mostly under conscious control now, but entering into certain areas still triggered a shift. His blue jacket and newsboy cap allowed him to mostly blend into Ankh-Morpork crowds, so he favoured that look.

He’d figured out how to get into and out of the Royal Bank, the Mint, the Palace, and the Tanty. Deacon had nearly gotten caught at Pseudopolis Yard one night, because the sliding roof tiles took him by surprise, but he played it off as coming to visit his friend… Nick Valentine, improvising, because Vimes wasn’t there that night. He hadn’t tried the Vimes estate yet. The scuttlebutt from the Assassins’ Guild about the Vimes manor was _interesting_.

Valentine, who’d been in the middle of writing up a traffic citation for a duck, had given Deacon a level look that said, _I know you’re up to horse crap, and you know that I know, so let’s cut this dance short_ , but what Valentine had said, a wry smile quirking at the corners of his lips, was, “Fancy you dropping in, huh?”

“Oh yeah, had to make sure the Watch was treating my favourite synth okay,” said Deacon, ignoring the odd looks that the dwarf Watchman with Valentine was giving him.

Then Deacon made his escape, and he heard the dwarf comment gruffly, “Humans are weird.”

“You said it,” Valentine agreed.

No, the Vimes manor would have to wait for later. With any luck, he’d be invited right in the front door. Preston was leaving soon, and rumor had it that there was going to be a going-away party.

Deacon had circled around the Golem Trust a few times. As he understood it, golems were created beings, made to serve humans, who ran off the words in their heads. They desired freedom by nonviolent means, and to that end, free golems worked until they had enough money to buy other golems, whom they then freed, and then those freed golems worked to free other golems…

Outside, the Trust was a battered building, littered with graffiti, some painted, some carved, along the lines of ‘crakc potz!’ and ‘potsherds go hom’. He’d dropped by and talked to Klug, the duty receptionist, a few times, and Klug had explained the purpose of the Golem Trust to him. It seemed too idealistic to be true. Klug said that golems were patient. They could wait. They were also looking to hire a human. There were places humans could go without a second glance, where a golem would attract attention, and they wanted someone to go check on the golems that they hired out, to make sure that they were being treated appropriately. The pay wasn’t much, but they felt it was fair. If he did well at that, there were always expeditions to uncover more golems to free.

It was, in a strange way, like what Deacon had previously done, if he’d actually done it. Hide among the crowd, gathering information to help free artificial people. He was either the sort of person who cared about an artificial people trying to free themselves, or nothing he’d ever done made any sense. So Deacon took the job, but the fact remained...

...nothing he’d ever done made any sense. 

It had started when the newspaper reporter had asked him how old he was. Deacon had just made something up, but the fact was, he didn’t know how old he was. He knew some of the lies he could tell, and he knew they were lies. There were other stories where he wasn’t sure if they were lies or not, and he had no way of telling, because they didn’t all fit together into a coherent narrative. The wizards had told him he was a fictional character, but was it too much to ask for a linear plot? Why did Deacon have to be an art piece, some sort of statement?

So he went back to Unseen University to take it up with the wizards. The buildings weren’t where he’d left them, which was unnerving. Valentine didn’t think they were in a simulation now, when Deacon had asked the synth about that. Something about liquorice? So the buildings just moved around on their own. Great.

Eventually, he found his way past the giant squid to the High Energy Magic building, looking for that Ponder Stibbons wizard, who’d seemed to have been vaguely in charge. Instead, he found a gaggle of student wizards and DiMA, who was lying prone on the floor, sketching out a chalk circle of eight interlocking designs. A stack of books sat beside him on the floor. Deacon took a moment to assess DiMA, looking for signs of mistreatment. All Deacon really knew about the prototype Gen 2 was that DiMA was Nick Valentine’s brother who ran a free synth refuge, which had been of rather intense interest to the Railroad, and that Sam Vimes had some issues with DiMA that Vimes didn’t want to talk about, which could be anything. Oh, and when DiMA had shown up in Ankh-Morpork, Longfellow had tried to kill him. That was interesting.

DiMA looked… fine, as far as Deacon could tell? He didn’t appear to be confined in any way. He didn’t look more battered than he’d been when Deacon had first seen him. He didn’t appear to be in new pain. Deacon asked, “You doing okay there… DiMA, was it?”

“I’m fine, Deacon,” said DiMA, who pushed up off the floor and into a sitting position, looking up at Deacon. He picked up one of the books next to him and flipped through it.

“Right, so, is that Ponder Stibbons dude around?” asked Deacon.

“Mister Stibbons has meetings all day,” said the scraggly, spotted one; Deacon had caught his name as Alf. “Anything we could help you with?”

“Maybe,” said Deacon, who was feeling entirely too much attention upon him. He took a deep breath. “I just, uhm… what’s my story, anyway?”

“You’re a quasi-real Mind incarnated into a physical body via transmogrification,” said the one known as Zinon; Deacon though he looked a bit Greek, Mediterranean, at least.

“No, I mean…” Deacon steeled himself, “My character story? The true story of Deacon.”

“Oh, there isn’t one,” said Xian, dismissively. He appeared to be Chinese.

“What,” said Deacon flattly. “Not even in your game notes?”

“Look, Hex did most of the Railroad stuff; you can’t expect it to hold together if examined closely,” said Xian, who walked over to examine the eight interlocking circles that DiMA had chalked on the floor, and he criticized, “You know anyone can do ritual magic, right? It’s nothing special.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong,” said Chatur, who loosely appeared to be Indian. “Deacon’s story _does_ hold together. In this essay, I shall…”

“Not again,” Alf groaned.

“No, no, go on,” prompted Deacon.

“But I’m not making a ritual circle,” DiMA said softly, “There are seven plus one elements common to all ritual circles, and this design manages to lack all of them. This is an unritual circle.”

“Unmagic,” Xian sniffed, “That was really popular, oh, thirty years ago or so, but it’s women’s magic, it is.”

“My pronouns don’t seem to stop it from working,” observed DiMA wryly.

Chatur continued, despite the side argument, “Deacon, as the game clearly shows, has an interest in the Sole Survivor and will comment on any actions of note that the Sole Survivor may have undertaken, such as killing Kellogg, upon first finding the Railroad. Indeed, a careful player will note Deacon in multiple locations about the game, positioned so as to observe any important events. However, this interest runs deeper. There is a terminal entry dating back to 2284, three years before the Sole Survivor emerges from Vault 111, which states, ‘PAM's been trying to find the location of the Institute in earnest. Failing. Deacon's convinced the solution lies in the past, not future. Deacon already knows the big secret - we know nothing about the Railroad before Wyatt was in charge (or is Deacon Johnny D???). Deacon's been digging into Institute sightings from years, even decades before. Or at least, that's what he says. Getting really tired of all his lies.’”

“Yes, but like I keep telling you, there’s also a Johnny D in the Atom Cats,” said Zinon.

Chatur continued on, as if Zinon hadn’t said anything, “Deacon’s interest in the Institute’s past coincides with his interest in Pre-War history. Of all of the Companions, Deacon is the one who knows the most about what went on before the War -”

“Curie knows plenty of pre-War stuff. So does Codsworth,” reminded Alf.

“Yes, but they’re robots…” Chatur wheedled.

“Excuse me? Nick Valentine has the memories of a Pre-War copper!” Xian corrected.

“He doesn’t count, he’s a synth,” said Chatur.

Deacon looked sidelong at DiMA, who stood and walked over to a desk with a little hand-made name tag that said ‘Chatur Bakshi’. DiMA sorted through the piles of papers and picked up an old, battered book, and he walked back towards his unmagic circle.

“DiMA, I didn’t mean you, you know I don’t think of you as a synth,” Chatur pleaded, with alarm. “Let’s not put my Counter Spellcasting homework in the unmagic circle, please?”

DiMA paused a moment, the expression on his face best described as ‘do you actually listen to what you’re saying’, but Xian insisted, “Oh, that circle’s rubbish, it probably doesn’t even work,” and he pulled the book out of DiMA’s hands and dropped it in the circle. It hit with a _thump_ and seemed diminished, in some sense, as if there’d been a sparkle there, which had gone out. The wizarding students and DiMA all stared at the circle. Xian laughed nervously and said, “Eh-heh… whoops.”

“I wasn’t actually going to drop it,” DiMA said, and he sounded slightly cross. “I knew the unmagic circle was going to work.”

“Xian, do you know how many hours that homework took me?” Chatur roared, and he stamped over and scuffed the chalk circle with his foot. 

“No, Xian doesn’t, because he hasn’t done his yet,” said Zinon, smugly.

“Hours?” murmured DiMA. He picked the book back up and flipped through the pages idly.

“Well, if you’d done it, Xian, you’d know that tracing out the counter spell gates takes -” started Chatur.

“Five seconds,” said DiMA. “Maybe three, if you optimize your algorithm. They’re only logic gates by a different name.” He handed the book back to Chatur.

“Okay, maybe five seconds if I put it into Hex, but he’s been so tetchy lately, won’t even run my save files, and me on the brink of _Ad Victoriam_ ,” grumped Chatur. 

Deacon caught _that_ and put it together with Chatur’s comment about not thinking of DiMA as a synth, and he sort of thought he understood why DiMA had been ready, without hesitation, to dump Chatur’s homework in some weird unritual circle. Deacon didn’t know that he himself would have been so… polite about things, considering. But… it wasn’t like the Brotherhood of Bigots… _cough_ … Steel was real, or anything, and Deacon did want information out of Chatur.

Without a pause, Chatur looked back at Deacon. “Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted, Desdemona’s entry from 2286 says, ‘Deacon was barely here all year. Chasing ghosts.’ The 2287 entry, the very year the Solve Survivor emerges, says, ‘Deacon working on secret project. Code name Wanderer. Deacon has a wild theory and an even wilder plan (Tea Party). I agree there's something strange there, but I'm withholding judgement.’ So you put it together. Back in 2284, Pam was trying to find the Institute. Deacon’s solution was to look to the past. He discovered that some Institute scientists and a mercenary who bore a striking resemblance to Conrad Kellog, bane of the Railroad, arrived at Vault 111 in 2227. 2227 was only two years before the Broken Mask incident. Deacon was in a perfect position to put together the facts that the Institute must have gotten something out of Vault 111 that improved their synth production enough that synths could then pass as human. I would propose that Deacon spent much of his time waiting for the Sole Survivor to emerge from Vault 111, and if you leave Vault 111 and head west, you eventually find a hillside with a tarp strung between a couple of trees, protecting a chair, a table, and a wooden windscreen, marked with a Railroad sign. Someone was sitting there in sunshine and rain. There’s water there, so someone wanted to be hydrated. But then they left suddenly… possibly following the Sole Survivor.”

Deacon could sort of remember that happening. It had the sound of making sense, and yet, it also felt unreal. He shifted, uncomfortable, that someone else, someone who said things like _Ad Victoriam_ , could know such things about him.

Chatur, oblivious to Deacon’s discomfort, continued without pause, “When the Sole Survivor reaches Diamond City, who is there but Deacon, disguised as a Diamond City Security guard, there to observe the arrival of the Sole Survivor? In Goodneighbour, Deacon is there with the Drifters. In the Memory Den, Deacon is in a memory Lounger. At Bunker Hill, disguised as a caravan worker. In every case, he’ll remind the Sole Survivor that they have important things to do. In any case, I conjecture that Deacon’s “Wanderer’ project was, in fact, the Sole Survivor. Indeed, ‘Wanderer’ is a code name that the Sole Survivor can select when joining the Railroad, and Deacon even has dialogue to comment to the Sole Survivor that ‘you really like to wander’. Deacon was clearly hoping that the Sole Survivor, with their ties to the Institute, might be able to get Deacon inside the Institute...”

Deacon had done that, hadn’t he? Used Sam Vimes to get into the Institute?

Chatur, who clearly didn’t need any further prompting or encouragement from Deacon in order to continue, conjectured, “Now, in terms of his in-game race, Deacon is tagged as human, so he probably isn’t a synth, although he may be something other human, for which I will provide support later, but with regards to his speech about his recall code, ‘That's the safety net the brain docs put in. An ejector seat to bring back your old synth self. I don't know for certain, but I imagine it's a big old wad of trauma and cupcakes. Except with no cupcakes. Don't use the code unless you absolutely have to. It'll wipe my memories. I'm not sure how much of me will even be left.’ That isn’t how Commonwealth recall codes work, but it is how recall codes worked in the Capital Wasteland, suggesting that Deacon has been around for quite a while and travelled extensively, which goes along with other statements he’s made.”

Deacon could remember saying, _I don't like talking about it. I was one of the first synths they did the whole cranium reboot on. So it was a bit of a botch job. Most synths have fun fake memories. A happy home, a family. Me, I got nothing. And that... well, it does something to you_ , but he didn’t remember who he’d said it to. He’d thought it had been a lie, at the time. Now, standing here, with a mess of self-contradictory memories, he wasn’t so sure.

“Deacon will also state that he always has been in the Sole Survivor’s corner,” Chatur continued, apparently in some sort of zone, “providing further evidence that Deacon had indeed been watching the Sole Survivor, hoping they may be of use against the Institute. Of course, from a literary perspective, Deacon is teaching us that even we, as players, cannot be trusted because, in reading his so-called recall code, we have betrayed his trust, thereby proving him right in his assertion that you can’t trust everyone.” 

“Your game has someone lie about being a synth and make a perverse joke of a recall code in order to advance one of the Companion storylines. This is… ‘fun’ and possesses literary value,” said DiMA mildly.

“Don’t take it personally; it’s not like any of this is real,” Chatur said, brushing it off.

“I assure you, if I was taking any of this personally, you wouldn’t know it,” DiMA said.

Deacon felt unnerved by that statement. Chatur didn’t look unnerved, though, so Deacon thought Chatur was definitely missing something. What was Sam Vimes’s beef with DiMA? Deacon suddenly felt knowing the answer to that question just might be important.

Chatur segued on blithely, “Moreover, if you kill Deacon -”

“What,” Deacon sputtered, glad of the sunglasses that covered his staring eyes.

“It’s just a game,” Chatur huffed, “Anyway, if you kill Deacon, he doesn’t drop a synth component -”

“Why are we talking about killing me?” asked Deacon, backing away. Was the door where he’d left it?

Chatur frowned in consternation. “I’m not talking about killing _you_ , I’m talking about killing Deacon. Anyway, eventually, Deacon will claim to actually be the secret leader of the Railroad, the éminence grise behind Desdemona. He will claim that he, Johnny D, and Watts founded the Railroad 60 or 70 years ago. He refers to this as ‘The Big Secret’ -”

“If you pass the speech check, he admits it’s a lie,” interrupts Zinon.

“But we’ve heard ‘The Big Secret’ before!” Chatur crowed, ignoring Zinon. “Remember? Desdemona’s terminal entries? ‘Deacon already knows the big secret - we know nothing about the Railroad before Wyatt was in charge (or is Deacon Johnny D???).’ Johnny D may stand for Johnny Deacon! A John D is mentioned in the 2266 log from Wyatt, a previous Railroad leader before Desdemona, ‘Gathered surviving runners, held an election. I lost, or won, depending on how you look at it. After the HQ massacre, most people simply left the Railroad. Only one person survived HQ, a runner named John D. He called out for volunteers to get some of the old files. No one stepped forward.’ 2267, John D is mentioned again, ‘John D has been finding tourists at a pretty good clip. But he keeps their identities to himself. Operational security he calls it. It makes me grind my teeth, but he's probably right.’ Why would Wyatt let John D keep secrets from him, unless John D actually founded the Railroad? A 2273 March entry, ‘John developed a dead drop system we've been using.’ And then… a 2273 Dec entry, now by new Railroad leader Pinky, ‘Deacon (that's what he's calling himself now) had an escape route planned, and most of the survivors owe him their life. Wyatt didn't make it past the first hail of bullets.’ This is Deacon’s first reference, and we know that he was calling himself something else before, which suggests that he is John D.”

“Yeah, but… Deacon says he founded the Railroad with Johnny D, so unless you want to say he was beside himself, you’ve got a bit of a problem there,” said Alf, “That, an’ he doesn’t look 60-70 years old.”

“Ah hah, but we know that Deacon goes in for regular plastic surgery and has aspirations of disguising himself as a Mr. Handy,” said Chatur, wagging his finger. “You see, 2275, ‘I kicked Deacon out of HQ, got sick of the lying, face-changing son of a bitch. That month he spent as a Ghoul freaked a lot of people out.’ I’m going to come back to that bit about spending a month as a ghoul, don’t you worry.”

Deacon was stuck listening to a student wizard pontify about his backstory without actually accepting that it was Deacon’s backstory. It was like Deacon the person and Deacon the fictional character were completely divorced concepts for Chatur. For that matter, it seemed like synths in game and the very real DiMA who had retired off to a corner stool with a stack of papers were also completely seperate things to Chatur. It was fascinatingly bonkers, like a trainwreck. Even now, one wheel was spinning off towards the horizon, going _gloing_. Deacon said dryly, “Oh, yeah, I was definitely concerned that you wouldn’t talk about the month I spent as a ghoul, but go on.”

“Well, it’s just… there’s a lot of moving parts to masquerading as a ghoul, you know? Rotting flesh, the smell, the eyes… and Deacon never does taken off his sunglasses, so I'd say this is evidence that Deacon really is a ghoul, and all the times he appears are human are just a disguise,” said Chatur. “Also, it would explain how he could have founded the Railroad 60 or 70 years ago and still be alive, insofar as ghouls don’t age. He also claims to have been at the Castle 60 years ago, when it was crawling with Minutemen.”

“Bold assertion,” said Deacon, and he made a mental note to go find a lavatory in the university that had a mirror and, very carefully, when no one was looking, take his sunglasses off. He was going to have to get a new pair, anyway. There were sunglasses in Ankh-Morpork, but his aviator shades stood out like a sore thumb.

Chatur rambled on, “Of course, we know Deacon is a liar, but you have to pass a speech check just to get Deacon to admit he’s lying, so what if the big secret, the great lie, is really that he’s lying about lying? What if he’s mostly telling the truth and getting his rocks off on everyone being convinced that he’s lying when he’s telling the truth? What if he really did found the Railroad? It would explain why, despite being kicked out by Pinky, he’s still core Railroad leadership under Desdemona. It would explain why, when Deacon wanted PAM to be mothballed, Desdemona was unable to simply order Deacon to do what she wanted and had to reason with him instead. In addition, Tinker Tom conjectures about Deacon’s apparent agelessness.”

Zinon ahemed, “Actually, Tinker Tom thinks that Deacon time travels.”

“Because Deacon has been found throughout time!” Chatur said triumphantly, “Because he’s an immortal ghoul. He’s done ops in the Capital Wasteland, and he knows about President Eden, who was destroyed over ten years ago. He’s been to Greenland -”

Xian countered, “Or Deacon just talked to any of the hundreds of people who heard Eden’s radio messages…”

Chatur ignored Xian. The student wizards were all fascinatingly good at ignoring each other. They were like cats. “Now, Deacon hates heights and sunlight and prefers to be underground… which, no, does not make him a dwarf vampire. No, I conjecture that Deacon was, in fact, a Vault Dweller! Which explains where he got his blue suit. This would explain the awkward, formal politeness between Deacon and MacCready, as if they were people who were once acquainted but now not so much. MacCready will even insinuate that he may know who Deacon’s true self is. Deacon also talks about how much he loves Vaults and even claims that he grew up in a Vault and was a morale officer there. Deacon seems to be too old, based on the terminal entries, to be the Lone Wanderer from Vault 101. Now, Vault 11… everyone died there except one man. Could Deacon be that man? Deacon would have had plenty of time to trek from the West Coast to the East Coast to be a founding member of the Railroad. There is evidence that Deacon has been to the West Coast. He is aware of Robert House and claims to have won Mr. Handy override codes in a poker game, and where would one be playing poker but in a Casino… a Casino, in Las Vegas. He will also claim that he was a soldier out west. He may have been a soldier for the Enclave or the NCR, and either way, he could have encountered radiation that turned him into a ghoul…”

“You know, Deacon will state that the Railroad attempted to recruit him after his wife, Barbara, was killed. He can’t have founded it and have also been recruited into it. He’s lying about one of those things and possibly both,” reasoned Zinon. “And look, when he’s in beautiful, tranquil locations, he can comment, ‘She would have liked this.’”

“He could have founded it in the memory of his wife,” quibbled Chatur. “Moreover, he’s not romanceable, possibly out of respect to his dead wife. ‘Can you ever truly escape your past? God, I hope so,’ he’ll say.”

“Honestly, his comment about trying to have children doesn’t make sense if he’s a ghoul,” said Alf.

“I’m fairly sure he could still _try_ , if Hancock is any indication, he just oughtn't expect success,” Xian said thoughtfully.

Chatur finally seemed to be done with his long-winded conspiracy theory that Deacon was the West Coast survivor of Vault 11, an Enclave or NCR soldier, a ghoul, and the founder of the Railroad. Deacon felt like he needed a beer. He said, “Well… that sure was a thing. Thanks?”

“I’ve got one about Piper, as well,” Chatur said hopefully.

“Oh, whoops, I think I left my oven on,” Deacon lied, and he left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: As the series progresses, Vimes seems to get an increased sensitivity to seeing those supernatural types that most people miss, and he’s sometimes hinted at being naturally a little knurd, which includes ‘seeing the world as it is’, so we decided to run with that for the Soul Cake duck.
> 
> S: As for Nick and Anvilfoot spotting Death, we know from _Soul Music_ that Watchmen are more capable of recognizing Death for what he is when they see him (or Susan acting in his capacity), even when he (or she) isn’t actually “on the job”, and look, if Fred can recognize Death, I’m figuring Nick Valentine can.
> 
> S: “So what are you guys using as your fanfic background for Deacon?” “All of ‘em.” Been really looking forward to sharing with you guys just how much we screwed over that poor guy. Credit to Oxhorn [Chatur's Deacon theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSnMbZsJwE). It's a bit too out there for me (I assume that sometimes, Deacon just lies), but it's pretty entertaining. Deacon origin theories also include originating from… damn near every Vault ever mentioned in the series, [Luis Rosa](https://fallout4-companionsreact.tumblr.com/post/144304539739/big-ass-crazy-theory-deacons-origin-in-fallout), the Lone Wanderer, and more. We decided that rather than picking one, we're going to go with "he remembers all of the above, although some backstories are remembered more strongly than others, and which one can shift". This... kind of makes him a mess.
> 
> A: Igorina! The Watch is mentioned as having an Igorina in "Raising Steam", the last of the Discworld books. No mention is made of the Watch Igor. I will confess, "Raising Steam" has editing problems. Pratchett may have just meant Igor. But S and I are going somewhere with this.
> 
> A: I went through all the Discworld books to see if bobby pins were ever mentioned. They do not seem to have ever been mentioned in a Discworld book. Hairpins have been mentioned, but hairpins are a generic term for a large category that includes bobby pins. Bobby pins weren't invented until around 1920 on Roundworld, and the Discworld seems closer to 1837 in Roundworld times. Thus: Sammie pins.
> 
> A: [Bahama Mama Sausage](http://www.schmidtssausageshop.com/schmidts-jumbo-bahama-mama-pack-2.html) is delicious. It is not to be confused with [Bahamut](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Bahamut).
> 
> A: Most cases of drugged/sabotaged Halloween candy are done to target specific children. [It's not usually done at random.](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/halloween-non-poisonings/)
> 
> A: Shaun is probably not an insomniac because of inheriting it from Vimes. Shaun is probably an insomniac because he's a synth. (I tend to assume Gen 3 synths do need some sleep, just maybe not as much as a normal human, because that's the easiest way to reconcile contradictory game evidence.) But Vimes looks for excuses to beat himself up.
> 
> A: As a general note, re: Nick in the Watch. Most of what Nick likes doing is done by the Watch in Ankh-Morpork. Murder investigations? Done by the Watch. Missing people? Done by the Watch. Most of what a private eye actually does in a big city - blackmail, looking for unfaithful spouses - is not Nick's favourite stuff. Diamond City's Security Force is corrupt and incompetent, but in a city with a mostly competent and uncorrupt police force, Nick would probably a cop instead of a private eye.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	5. Hit and Run * Still on the Books * Under Consideration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Bright Lights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTgZJyicteE&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=10) by Matchbox 20.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Hit and Run * Still on the Books * Under Consideration_

Piper paused on Hermetica Street and double checked the address she had written down. It had taken some time to arrange a meeting with Sally, since they had to figure out each other’s schedules via messages left at the Pseudopolis Yard front desk. Eventually they managed to set a meeting time and place, although the name of the club Sally had recommended was… eyebrow-raising, at the very least: the Heaving Bosom. Within ten minutes of arriving in Ankh-Morpork, she’d been warned about how the place treated people with same-sex attraction and that a woman wearing pants was viewed as obscene, giving Piper the impression of a deeply repressed city, and now here she was, invited to a club named “The Heaving Bosom”.

Piper shrugged it off and entered. The club was decorated… well, like you’d expect a group of vampires to want their club decorated: lots of blacks and reds and absolutely no mirrors. “Piper, hello,” Sally greeted from where she’d been waiting in the lobby, a bit of fang showing in her smile. “I’m glad to see you made it.”

Piper looked around and gestured to the room at large. “You guys, uh, really playing to the stereotypes, aren’t you?”

Sally practically beamed. “There are certain expectations that come with the fangs, you know? And the living feel a bit more comfortable when we meet those at least a little.”

They were shown to their seat and Sally suggested, “You’ll want to go with the wine. It’s… probably a little warmer than you’re used to, but their absinthe isn’t a good idea unless you’re already dead.”

“Thanks,” answered Piper, and then she hesitated. “Actually, uhm… I should probably get water. I landed a job, but I haven’t been paid yet.”

Sally waved her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this. Besides, you’ll want to stay away from the water in this city unless you’ve got a _really_ strong immune system.”

“Don’t worry, I do, but I’ll take your offer.” The waiter accepted their order and moved off. Piper looked around the room once more, although she was distracted for a moment by the performance on the stage. Her eyes widened and she blushed a little before looking down at the table. “So, uhm… why’d you suggest this place, anyway?”

Sally coughed. “Oh. Well, I thought this might be a safer place for any questions you might have if they happened to concern… alternative lifestyles. Or even deathstyles, as the case may be.”

Piper’s eyes widened again. “So this… isn’t _just_ a vampire club.”

Sally laughed. “Of course not! It’s a Black Ribboner club, which believe me, _is_ an alternative deathstyle.” Then she grinned. “But as far as partners go, vampires are usually more accepting of arrangements beyond the most common ones.”

Piper heaved a sigh of relief to finally have made it to the same page. “Right, that. Bl- er, Mister Vimes said you might know something about what you need to watch out for when you’re a bisexual woman in this city.” Piper paused. “Or gay?”

Sally looked confused. “Bisexual?”

Now it was Piper’s turn to look confused. “You know… someone who likes more than just one sex?”

Sally brightened. “Oh, yeah, that’s me!” Then she smiled. “Of course you want more than one sex,” she added with a wink.

Piper blushed. “Oh, uhm… I meant…”

The vampire reached over and placed a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, I was just playing with you.”

“Right, of course,” Piper chuckled, picking up the glass of wine that the waiter had just set down. “Is it hot in here, or…” she muttered, looking around. She took a sip to help cover her nervousness.

Sally bit her lip for a moment, as though she were keeping herself from saying something she shouldn’t. Then she finally settled on whatever she felt she should say. “Anyway, Mister Vimes was right about me, but I’m not really sure what advice I could give that you haven’t already heard. For one thing, I’m a vampire. There are certain things we can get away with that humans can’t, partially because they’re expected of us. Sure, I’ve got to deal with anti-vampire bias, but if someone hates vampires, that was already factored in, and if someone has accepted vampires or is trying to work towards that, they see accepting that as part of the package. The truth is, I’m not even sure that we’re more likely to be… bisexuals than non-vampires,” she smiled again. “We’re just more likely to admit it.”

Piper sighed. “All right. Well, at least thanks for telling me that much.” She put her drink back down and frowned. “I really, _really_ hate the idea of hiding what I am. I believe in bringing the truth to light, not... stuffing it in a closet!”

Sally looked thoughtful. “You know, that almost sounds like Mister Vimes. He’s always going on about dragging things into the light.”

“He’s the one who warned me to hide,” Piper complained. Then she shrugged. “Although he did promise he’d try to do something about the situation.”

The vampire leaned in, interested. “He did?” Then she caught Piper’s eye and gave her an intent look. “Because you can believe me, a promise like that from him means more than the oath from a holy man swearing by their own gods.” Then she glanced away, considering something for a moment. “By the way, you’ll want to avoid a few religions in particular. The followers of Io or Offler, especially, and probably most of the Omnian sects, although the Omnians have so many splits, you can probably find one that claims that isexuals are the _more_ holy than everyone else. It’s hard to keep up with Omnians.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Piper chuckled, finishing off her wine.

“Y’know… one way you may be able to get away with being open more easily is if you date a vampire.” She sipped her absinthe and smiled. “After all, it’s _expected_ of us.”

Piper’s eyes widened once more. “Are you _serious_?”

“Only if you’re interested. I mean, obviously _I_ wouldn’t make the mistake of asking out someone who isn’t interested in me, so then it could only _possibly_ be a joke. Please, _me_ , committing a faux-pas like _that_?” Sally grinned.

Piper burst out laughing. “You know, I…” she coughed. “I guess I wouldn’t mind getting to know you a bit better.”

“Great! It’s a date, then!” Then Sally gave her a conspiratorial look. “Or we could just declare this one. What’s that saying, about the evening being young?”

The reporter looked at her hands and grinned. “Sure, I… that sounds nice.” She was blushing once more.

Sally shook her head and sighed. “Piper, do you have _any_ idea how attractive that blush is?”

* * *

Cheery and Igorina took in the bewildering array of bottles, boxes, packs, odds, ends, and recipes that their Commander was depositing upon them to use and reverse engineer. Igorina picked up a glowing bloodpack and cradled it as if it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She said, “Truly, sir, Hogswatch has come early…”

Igorina’s hairstyle could have been a DA quiff grown out long, Vimes mused, but he reminded himself that was both off-topic and irrelevant. “Probably the most important thing is the stimpaks, they seem like they’re the next best thing to a friendly Igor. They’ll even knit back together broken bone, though they don’t reattach severed limbs.”

Cheery asked, “Uhm, sir, why’s your… Dis-Organizer clicking?”

Vimes blinked and looked at the Pip-Boy on his arm. Shaun had shown him how to put meetings in the thing, so he’d kept wearing it. The Pip-Boy was clicking as it did when radioactivity was present. He walked around Cheery’s forensics workshop until he paused at a bunch of powder, which Cheery had labelled, ‘Slide, confiscated from 3 Jambutty Lane’. Vimes waved the Pip-Boy closer to the Slide, and the Pip-Boy clicked faster, reporting to him just how many rads the troll drug was emitting.

“Your Dis-Organizer detects troll drugs?” Cheery asked, sounding slightly confused but intrigued. She went back to one of her evidence lockers, pulled out a brick of Slab, and waved it at Vimes’s Pip-Boy, which clicked obligingly.

Vimes frowned. “It detects something called, uhm, nuclear radiation? It’s like magic radiation, just kind of rubbish.”

Cheery sorted through other assorted evidence and pulled out a bag of Scrape. The Pip-Boy clicked, and it clicked for the Crystal Slam, too. The Pip-Boy did not click for a confiscated bottle of love potion nor did it click for a small sack of arsenic. She said pensively, “There’s a metal in troll drugs; you find it in pitchblende alloy, too. It’s what’s left after you take the uselessium out. I don’t know what the Morporkian word for it would be, or if there’s a Morporkian word for it, but it’s… cursed. It makes beards fall out. Spend too much time in mines near pitchblende, and cancer eats the bones. Now I wonder…”

“Is this for trolls?” Igorina asked, holding up the Nuka-Cola Quartz.

“I don’t think so. It’s just a fizzy drink. It’s not official Watch business or anything, but if you could figure out how to replicate it, you could probably sell the recipe,” Vimes said, shrugging. The fact that his Pip-Boy was apparently a portable troll drugs detector, which meant that troll officers didn’t have to test drugs by licking them, which often then led to troll officers walking through walls, seemed rather more important, as did the fact that troll drugs were also apparently radioactive, which meant they wouldn’t be any good for any other form of life that got too close to them, human, dwarf, troll, or otherwise. The Watch handled troll drugs all the time. Did they all need RadAway?

If RadAway removed radiation and radiation was in troll drugs, could RadAway sober a hallucinating troll?

Cherry took the bottle of Nuka-Quartz and pointed out, “But it says Quartz.”

“You might want to rename it,” said Vimes, who wished they’d get back on the topic of radioactive troll drugs or stimpaks or literally anything other than fizzy drinks.

Igorina, though, still cradling the glowing blood pack, picked up a bottle of Nuka-Cherry and suggested, “Cheery-Cherry?”

* * *

Part of traffic duty involved checking the carriage licences. They didn’t even need to set up a barricade for a traffic stop. Traffic moved so slowly that Valentine could just follow Anvilfoot from carriage to trolley - trollies were actually troll-buses, trolls outfitted with a platform to carry passengers - to cart to sedan chair as they checked licences. 

There was a fresh blood-splatter on a rather fancy carriage of carved, elegant wood, as if it had just run something or someone over, and it had been coming rather quickly from a side street when it ran into the slow line of traffic on the main road. Anvilfoot sniffed the blood and proclaimed, “It’s not rat’s blood. Could have just hit a dog or a cat.”

Valentine looked at the height of the blood splatter and the pattern and said dubiously, “Big dog or cat.” dwarf-sized, at least… He peered back around the carriage, trying to see if there was a blood trail. He thought for a moment, and he whistled. Couldn’t hurt, might help.

“Now, now, none of that on duty,” Anvilfoot said in response to Valentine’s whistling, and he looked critically at a dwarf who just happened to be passing by in the line of sight where Valentine had been looking when he’d whistled. Anvilfoot added, “He doesn’t even have that much gold.”

The carriage driver didn’t address them, but when addressed, he said thinly, “I didn’t see clearly. Must have been a big dog.”

From inside the carriage, a lady’s voice demanded, “Why are we stopped?”

Technically, they weren’t stopped. The traffic was just moving very slowly. The carriage driver called back, “Nothing, m’lady.”

The door had a big family crest on it, like Vimes’s carriage did. Valentine thought, _Money_. Anvilfoot fearlessly hopped up on the floorboard and banged on the door and demanded of the occupants, “Either of you see what this carriage hit?”

“We don’t have to talk to lawn-ornaments,” said a snobby man’s voice.

Anvilfoot banged on the door harder and demanded, “Open up! I need to question you on what your carriage hit. If you dinged a dog, the Furriers’ Guild is going to be after you for ruining the pelt.”

“Little more than animals, really,” said the broad he’d heard before.

“Dog? Did I say dog? Must have meant dragon...fruit. Those red dragonfruits, down at the bazaar down the way,” the carriage driver corrected, unconvincingly.

Valentine loped around to the other side of the carriage and climbed the other footboard. He knocked on the other door and ahemed, “If you’d just answer a few questions…”

The dame screamed. 

Her fellow said in sneering tones, “It’s a monster, one of those Uberwaldian abominations.”

“Lance-Constable Valentine of the City Watch,” Valentine said. He wasn’t actually sure if he was supposed to or not. The human Nick Valentine, who he’d never been and who _had_ never been, had never done traffic duty.

“Oh yeah, Constable Anvilfoot,” said Anvilfoot, on the other side, “and look, if you hit a dragonfruit cart -”

“Not a cart,” the carriage driver said hastily. “Just some… fruit. Belonging to no one. In a pile. On the road. It’s a hazard, it is. You copper jobbies ought to be doing something about it.”

Dogmeat arrived then, and Valentine gave Dogmeat a fond scratching on the back of his neck, curiously examining the collar that someone had put on Dogmeat. Hanging from the collar was Badge #332. Who had gone and put a Watch badge on Dogmeat? Although come to think of it, based off what Valentine had heard about the Furriers’ Guild and the meat markets, that didn’t sound like a terrible idea. He led Dogmeat around to the blood stain, and Anvilfoot looked over at Dogmeat and said, “You’ve got a dog?” in sort of the way that one might comment about a particularly clever trained brahmin.

“No, not really,” said Valentine. Dogmeat was his own dog. He gestured at the blood stain. “Think you can track that, boy?”

“Huh,” said Anvilfoot, and he checked his layers of chainmail, eyes narrowed suspiciously. He muttered something about werewolves. 

Dogmeat barked an affirmative, and Valentine said, “So I’ll just go find that rogue pile of street obstructing dragonfruits.”

“I’ll still be here,” said Anvilfoot, looking down the line of glacial-moving traffic.

“Make him go away!” thundered the man in the carriage at his driver.

Valentine slipped away after Dogmeat. At night, the city streets weren’t as crowded, but it was still crowded. Many businesses were open 24/8. Here Valentine was, doing what Vimes was apparently worried about, wandering around the city at night. The blood had looked awfully fresh, and after a few blocks, Dogmeat found a splat on the street. It had already been walked over many times, and Dogmeat looked uncertainty between directions, looking back at the way the cart had rolled. Then he took off again, and not long after that, Dogmeat found an urchin, a boy of seven or eight, in a stovepipe hat, frayed scarf, jacket, vest, patched pants, cardboard-soled shoes, and more blood than humans were supposed to have outside their bodies. He also had a bucket of poo and a trowel.

The thing about Ankh-Morpork was, it sure smelled like a dump, but there were fewer experiments in practical scatology on the streets than one might expect, thanks to the efforts of those employed by Harry King to gather up such experiments. In fact, thinking back to Diamond City, that was something that should have tipped Valentine off that it wasn’t real: none of the stray cats or dogs ever made a mess in Diamond City. There wasn’t even brahmin dung. He supposed that the wizards hadn’t wanted to model that, just guts and gore. 

The boy was leaning heavily against a pole, blood trickling a little from his pale lips, and he didn’t seem to see Valentine as he approached, though he looked over glazedly when Valentine introduced, “Hey there, kiddo. I’m Lance-Constable Valentine. Y’need help to the Lady Syb?”

The Lady Sybil Free Hospital was where the Watch generally took injured people they encountered in the line of duty. Valentine had been informed that there were a few other hospitals in town, the better ones run by those funny Ramtops monks, and there was a handful of witches who could almost work miracles, and there was always Doughnut Jimmy, a racehorse veterinarian, but nine times out of ten, he’d be taking people to the Lady Syb.

Named after Vimes’s wife. Because the Vimeses were rich enough to fund a hospital.

The boy coughed, bringing more blood to his lips, and said faintly, “My name is Louis, and I collect dog poo for Sir Harry King. I’m a pureboy.” He looked at his bucket and sighed. “Oh, toss, I’ve gone and gotten blood on the pure… that’s a ha’penny I’ll not see the likes of…”

Valentine calculated how long it would take to get Louis to the Lady Syb and how much of his blood wasn’t inside him and decided to pick him up. The boy protested, “Hey, mister! Don’t leave my bucket! One of the other pureboys’ll snatch it!”

So Valentine carried a steadily bleeding boy and a bucket of dog poo off to the Lady Syb, Dogmeat padding along at his heels. Along the way, the boy rambled, mainly about poo, but he did say he’d been reaching for a particularly white piece of dog poo - that was extra pay, because the tanners could use it - when a carriage with the crest of the Omnius family had come thundering by more quickly than he could get out of the way. By the way, Mister Watchman, sir, did his dog need to go poo, by any chance? If so, could his dog please use Louis’s bucket, and thank you?

At the Lady Syb, the young doctor in training, a man of about 17 in a frock coat, took Louis off Valentine’s hands, muttering something about livers and spleens and wobbly green bits and how often he saw Harry King’s men, and he made the bucket of poo stay in the waiting room, where it blended in with the rest of the clientele.

On the way back to where Anvilfoot was stuck in traffic, Valentine bought Dogmeat a sausage off a cart, which Dogmeat cheerily ate, tail-wagging. Was Dogmeat supposed to eat on duty? Valentine had no idea, but thanks to Dogmeat’s nose, this had just turned out to be a hit and run or possibly a slam and sidle off.

Once he found Anvilfoot again, who was still unsuccessfully trying to get the folks in the carriage to talk, he leaned down, and then he leaned down more because Anvilfoot was a dwarf, and he explained what he’d learned in a low whisper.

An evil little smile crossed Anvilfoot’s mouth. “One of Harry King’s men? Oh, this is going to be good… Harry King looks after his own. Well, that’s that, then.” He pitched his voice louder, “You three, you’re all under arrest!”

* * *

The damnable piles of paperwork weren’t getting any shorter, no matter how hard Vimes tried. Everyone needed something from him. This was his life. Captain Sally, who was the Captain on at the Yard today, dropped by to point out the most pressing pieces of paperwork, to go over important Watch business and outstanding cases - they still didn’t know what had happened with poor Lai Zhenya, but they did know that she was dead, all her blood vessels pulled out in straight lines, almost like zither strings, and Sally twitched a bit as she said that - and schedules and all the interminable bureaucracy that made the Watch run.

Then Sally casually mentioned that two dwarf _ladies_ had gotten into a fight with a grag who wouldn’t issue them a marriage license, which had led to the two dwarf ladies cooling off in cells. Vimes was aware that Sally was watching him carefully.

Sally would have smelled Valentine on him, wouldn’t she? And Vimes on Valentine, and maybe heard how Vimes’s heartbeat sounded when he looked at Valentine. So would Angua. Bugger.

Ankh-Morpork wasn’t kind to her sons, daughters, and other children who preferred their own kind. There was, as far as he knew, no law about hanging women who fancied other women8, the way there was with men, and most of the gross indecency laws applied to men, not women, but Vimes suspected that being a woman who fancied women probably put one at a heightened risk of being the victim of gross indecency perpetrated towards oneself, largely by men.

But marriage was a matter of religion and bound by the laws of the church or temple or other institution of worship where a couple chose to wed, and so Vimes said slowly, “I suppose two openly female dwarfs marrying would be irregular to a grag, but couldn’t they have a civil ceremony?”

He’d had a civil ceremony at the Unseen University. Vimes and Sybil might have been the first couple to do so, but that was eleven years ago.

“Well, they can’t, sir. There’s a city and outskirts-wide law against same-sex marriage,” said Sally. 

“But… dwarfs?” Vimes said. Carrot had said he was fairly certain his stepmother was a woman, but that meant there was a chance she wasn’t, which meant Carrot might have a father and a step-father. One could never tell, with dwarfs, unless a dwarf openly stated herself female, and even then, when Cheery talked about her boyfriends, she’d say that she was pretty sure they were men. For all Vimes knew, maybe Cheery was dating other lady dwarfs.

“We all just assume that dwarf couples are dwarf and another sort of dwarf, don’t we, sir? We don’t ask, and they don’t tell, but yes, they really could be a dwarf and the same sort of dwarf, as long they’re just dwarfishly the same about it and not _openly_ the same,” said Sally, circumspectly, still watching Vimes carefully.

So marriage wasn’t all up to the rules of the churches? City law had to get its mucky hand involved? Vimes wasn’t going to take her word on it. When he was off duty, he checked with Archchancellor Ridcully, who backed up what Sally had said. Yes, of course, a decent number of discreet couples had come to Unseen University with certain hopes and dreams, and Ridcully, at least, would have been happy to oblige them, but it wasn’t a problem of wizarding lore. It was a problem of the civic law.

Vimes had promised Preston and the others that he’d do something about… he didn’t even know what to call the problem, a nebulous, many-headed hydra of prejudice. So Vimes gritted his teeth and went to Mr. Schwarzlache von Morecombe, who was the Ramkin family lawyer, which meant that he was now the Vimes family lawyer. He was pale in appearance, with pearly dead eyes and a scrawny neck, like a tortoise. Vimes hated him intensely, but what was the point of retaining one of those bloodsuckers if not to wring some use out of him?

Morecombe gave Vimes a lecture on Ankh-Morpork marriage law, starting with the Morporkian Empire and the kings of old…

Judgement Day arrived. Poncy angels descended en mass to harass poor, hard-working match girls. The dead broke out of their graves to complain that the living were doing it wrong and that, back in their day, you’d scrub your ears before showing up at Judgement Day. Demons broke free of the dis-organizers and then looked around, saw how scary it was getting, and demanded to be put right back in. 

It was three hours, and Vimes’s mind swam back to the conversation, prying itself away from thoughts of Ice Giants demanding their lawnmower back. Morecombe was droning on, “A strict textural reading of the overlapping and mutually contradictory marriage laws installed by both the kings and successive Patricians have led to a system where, all marriage is technically illegal.”

Vimes caught that, and he said, “Wait, hold up?”

“One king, in response to the previous king having an… interesting succession of male lovers, made a law to the effect of ‘marriage in this city-state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman,’ which included the troublemaking phrase, ‘This city-state and the surrounding areas or a political subdivision of this city-state and the surrounding areas may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.’ No one has ever been able to afford to make a lawsuit about it, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who takes it seriously -” Morecombe spoke tediously.

“ _All marriage is illegal?_ ”9 Vimes summarized incredulously. Gods, everyone really was guilty of something. He glared at his wedding ring, as if it had betrayed him.

“Yes,” granted Morecombe, “but again, there is also an ancient law that when translated into Morporkian from Latatian can be read to dictate that only men can marry men and women can only marry women. Incidentally, that same king also legalized a number of… distracting substances the very same day that he banned heterosexual marriage.”10

Vimes tried to do the math in his head. “Same king that was the father of the one that went and banned same sex marriage?”

“Oh no, not at all, the genealogy is much more complex than that, I think, you would find, if you examined the family trees…” started Morecombe, going through a complex web of second cousin in laws…

“Right, so, it’s a hot mess, it’s been a hot mess, and people are basically just picking out the crunchy bits that let young Emily and Jeremy and be married but will prevent Fofaela Stormbane and Orsigith Bittermace, yes?” said Vimes, whose hands were clenching the arms of the chair rather tightly. His knuckles had turned white.

“If one _really_ wanted to make a challenge of it, it _might_ hold up in court,” Morecombe’s tone was withered. He was a vampire. Any withering was past tense. “There is a Precedent. One Patrician married his chariot.”

Vimes made a face. 

“Neither the horse nor the driver. Just the chariot,” Morecombe clarified, “Which was not made of sapient pearwood or anything notable. It was merely an inanimate object, and as such, was not a woman, which set a Precedent for the concept that a man may be able to marry an entity that is not construed as a woman, which could be expanded to also construe that a woman may be able to marry an entity that is not a man.”

That seemed tenuous. “Has anyone tried to make that challenge?”

“Not seriously,” said Morecombe, which really meant, ‘not with enough money’.

“Okay, so who’s making it not-seriously?” asked Vimes.

Which led him to the BLT Defenders, or the Bent, Lavender, and Transfigurative Defenders. Vimes expected the acronym caused a great deal of confusion, and his stomach grumbled. They were all rather concerned when a rumpled off-duty Watchman with no rank insignia at all showed up to one of their meetings. One of them gently tried to direct him to the nearest sandwich shop, saying folks made that mistake all the time. Evidently, they were rather worried that he might arrest them, and as it turned out, there were a score of things he could arrest them for.

Vimes had never arrested anyone for those sorts of things, he didn’t think. If he was going to start now, he supposed that he would have to start with himself. Particularly...

__

> _Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with an other male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour._

‘Gross indecency’ was a deliberately vague term, largely constructed so that people in power could do away with people with slightly smaller amounts of power.

__

> _Furthermore, the section included a vague clause which allowed for the prosecution of anyone who played "party to the commission of" gross indecency. This clause, the poet Symonds noticed, served essentially as a conspiracy charge, allowing for a broader pool of convictions._

Thinking about it, though, under Lord Winder, the Night Watch had often put people on the Hurry-Up Wagon, and maybe Vimes had never intentionally arrested anyone for that, but people had been arrested for it, to be sure. Even the Day Watch under Vetinari had done some. These people remembered.

A worried face asked, “And I haven’t seen you at any of the meetings, you’re er…”

Vimes looked around the hand painted sign, and his gaze settled on one hastily-added word, and he said faintly, “An ally, possibly.”

The meeting went on. They were a group of terribly enthusiastic people, mostly human, a few openly lady dwarfs, a troll lady who was wearing more clothing than trolls considered decent, a zombie who looked like he might have died of being nailed to a fence and, as Vimes should have suspected, a vampire. Eventually, they seemed to forget about the rumpled off-duty Watchman standing in the back, leaning against the wall, and they went on with their conjecture.

Their grand plan was to write a politely-worded letter to the Patrician. They had done this last month, also, and had been doing so for years. The letters that they got back, which Vimes rather suspected were written by Drumknott or some other clerk and not even the Patrician himself, because the cadence sounded off to him, generally were to the tune of ‘it would upset the stability of the city, and the High Priests of Blind Io and Offler are on record as being publicly opposed’.

That made Vimes itch. He could do with those two old farts throwing a wobbler again. If he would be upsetting them, it would be all to the better. He wasn’t quite sure yet what he was going to do to upset them, but he’d find something.

The speaker went on about their plan for the month. What was different about this letter, though, was that they were going to enclose an aliquot of glitter. Glitter-bombing, they called it. It was the most pathetic thing he’d heard all week, and he’d talked to Nobby.

Their argument for marriage basically boiled down to, “Because we’d like to.” That was not an argument that was ever going to convince Vetinari, Vimes knew. One of the humans, a darker skinned woman with dark hair, had the argument that, among her people, same-sex attracted people were regarded as sacred and that her personal religious beliefs were being infringed. That argument seemed to have a bit more meat on it, and while Vimes wasn’t religious, he’d cheerily abuse religious traditions if it suited his purposes.

The troll woman argued that this was all pointless and that they ought to be more concerned about how their people were going missing in the streets. Vimes looked at her again, more closely, because she was talking about crimes. She’d also had plaster-work done, he could tell, when he squinted. The Watch was tiny, even at around three hundred now, for a city of around one million, not counting suburbs. These days, the Watch went out looking for trouble, and they found it, but there was a great deal of trouble going unfound.

The troll woman caught that Vimes was looking at her, and she gave him a dirty look. Trolls were very good at dirty looks. This dirt had strata to it. Then she didn’t talk anymore about her missing people. 

At the end, Vimes took some pamphlets, and the human giving them to him nearly cried with joy, exclaiming, “No one’s ever actually asked for pamphlets before! Here, take some extras for your friends. But. Uhm. If you come back, could you wear something… different?"

"What's wrong with my uniform?" Vimes snapped. 

The man held his hands up placatingly. "I know that Commander Vimes and Captain Carrot have done things with the Watch, these days, but Fritz McNab… " he looked over at the departing zombie, "...He remembers Captain Findthee Swing."

Vimes’s mouth made an 'oh'. He'd taken a ruler to Swing's voice box and left him in a burning building. That decision just kept paying dividends. What else did he have to wear, though? He wasn't going to wear the posh clothes that Sybil bought for him. He had his Commonwealth clothes, he supposed. Sybil had neatly packed them away. The trenchcoat and fedora of Nick's that Ellie had given him might do. 

Vimes walked home and flipped through the pamphlets listlessly. Gods, but those pamphlets were rubbish, and he could see why none of their arguments had ever worked. One didn’t try to appeal to emotion with Vetinari; the man didn’t have any. Vimes wondered if he could put together an argument that might sway the old carnivorous flamingo. It’d be an odd thing to try to work into a budget meeting…

But what the Hell, if it didn’t work, Vimes could always ask Sybil to talk to Havelock about it over tea.

8 This was because the Patrician who had written the Hedgehog Act into law didn’t believe in lesbians. He also didn’t believe in unicorns and died when he was stabbed by one.

9 [Some areas of Roundworld](https://theweek.com/articles/499519/texas-accidentally-bans-straightmarriage) have also made this mistake.

10 [Whoops!](https://www.thedailybeast.com/irish-government-goes-full-caligula-legalizing-drugs-and-banning-heterosexuality-for-a-day)

* * *

Nights went by. At one point, Nick had to put a duck in a clamp. It was not the best of nights. Corporal Clair Brown was making progress on getting Nick through the Ankh-Morpork legal code, though, and sometimes, Lance-Constable Umidrut Metalmaul would come around and help as well. Nick found an offending passage again and protested, “Mimes?”

“Yes. Mimes,” Brown said sternly.

Every legal code had a subset of laws that had never been repealed but weren’t enforced. The original Nick Valentine had known that, and even if he wasn’t real, the principle was still true. So why were the damn laws about the mimes actually enforced?

“Fine,” Nick acquiesced, dropping the subject. “So why are movies, ahem, clickies illegal?”

Brown looked at him suspiciously and asked as if Nick were dealing in contraband, “How do you know what clickies are?”

“Uh,” said Nick, who mostly knew what movies were from the memories of a fictional dead man, although he had run into some semi-functional movie theatres and drive-ins as himself. “I’ve been to them?”

Brown frowned. “They’re illegal because creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions broke through one and then a 50 foot woman kidnapped the Librarian and climbed the Tower of Art.”

“Oh… kay,” said Nick, and they continued on.

He came to a part that gave him pause, not because of the weirdness of it - he was getting good at handling weirdness, if he said so himself - but because of the banal essential _meanness_ of it. Nick looked at Brown and Metalmaul, and he thought over the various things he’d seen them do and say, and he asked himself, ‘Just how safe am I around them?’

“So, do we enforce the sodomy laws?” he asked carefully. Vimes had claimed they didn’t, but it was worth verifying.

“No!” said Metalmaul11, who turned a scrutinizing look on Nick.

Brown laughed and added, “Oh no, the Seamstresses’ Guild made sure of it that we don’t, once the Blue Cat Club became popular.”

“Oh… good,” said Nick. Same-sex intercourse had been decriminalized in Illinois in 1962, long before the human Nick Valentine had been born. He tapped the page. “But it’s still on the books.”

Metalmaul scowled and crossed his arms. “Hmph. Humans.”

11 Umidrut Metalmaul was a dwarf who fancied dwarfs. Not _other_ dwarfs. Just dwarfs.

* * *

Valentine casually wandered into the main room of the High Energy Magic Building in Unseen University, glancing around for one person in particular. Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic (an apt title, Nick suspected, given that he had been in charge of the creation of the game that he had been made from, and that Sam had been pulled into) glanced up. “Oh. Uhm. Mister Valentine, wasn’t it? If you’re looking for DiMA, he’s over talking to Hex again,” and he gestured vaguely towards the large ant-powered computer where DiMA could, indeed, be seen studying a paper printout that Hex had produced.

Ponder was something of a hard read, but if Valentine had been a telepath or perhaps a psyker, he could have known that Ponder was... 

> _Young, bright, and often exasperated with the older wizards, he’d gotten rather good at finding ways to persuade them into supporting his sometimes hard-to-fathom experiments. He hadn’t really wanted to make a game. He had wanted to find a way to study simulated worlds and unreal worlds and their intersection with real worlds, because if imagination and stories led to belief and belief made things real, surely simulated and unreal worlds could have rather large impacts on the real one. Of course, there was no way he would have gotten funding for that through the Archchancellor, so he and Hex made his simulation into a game and, taking into account Ridcully’s fondness for crossbows, had made that game into a shooter. Of course, the game that actually got put together (more by Hex than by Ponder, once certain initial parameters were set) seemed to contain an awful lot that Ponder hadn’t actually thought to put in there, almost as if ideas were funneling into it from somewhere else. Ponder would have liked to keep the experiment running, since that sort of unexpected interaction was what he had been hoping to examine at the start._
> 
> _Unfortunately, the process of pulling Vimes out had broken the game. Ponder suspected it had to do with all those other people that Vimes had insisted on bringing back with him. The day that Hex had reported that there were more minds than just the Commander’s in the game had been particularly surprising. The very high magic field that the simulation ran in, the background thaumic radiation in the area where the wizards had once split the thaum, and whatever… external source had been feeding ideas into the game combined with the sheer power of Sam Vimes’ belief that he was interacting with real people to actually turn those he interacted with most often or in the most significant ways into real people, and once they were real, there was no way that the Commander would abandon them to the simulation._
> 
> _Once the fictional constructs had been reified into the real world, DiMA had promptly gone and displayed the capacity to use magic, which was not something any of his game scripting should have granted him. The Unseen University existed, at least on some level, for the containment of men who could use magic, something which Ponder knew but never mentioned aloud. He’d asked DiMA to stay. It was the only thing for it._
> 
> _Ponder had mixed feelings about that. DiMA did fascinate him, and for the most part, he was pleasant enough to talk to, intelligent, but without the sort of… bombast that he’d grown used to from the older wizards. But dealing with him was… unnerving. There was something alien about DiMA, and when Ponder spoke to him, he always got the sense that it was he and not DiMA who was actually being studied. That, and DiMA already seemed to have a better understanding of how Hex thought than Ponder did, and the still-youngish wizard somewhat resented that._

But Nick Valentine wasn’t a telepath or psyker.

Nick thanked the wizard and wandered past him and towards his brother. Those graduate student wizards and their desks that he’d glanced at before weren’t there, but the room seemed to remodel itself on a regular basis, currently boasting toadstools the size of chairs where the student desks had been. A white mask on the wall seemed to be watching him.

DiMA set down the readout and looked up at Nick, giving him a faint smile. “It is good to see you again, brother,” he said, his voice containing its usual gentleness. He picked up a set of tweezers and moved around to one of the glass bubbles containing Hex’s ants. He carefully lifted a lid.

Nick returned DiMA’s smile with a less restrained one and replied, “Good to see you, too. What are you up to, there?”

DiMA reached down towards one of the ant hills and very carefully plucked something up from it. Nick wasn’t sure, but he thought it looked like he had somehow moved his tweezers _through_ the ant hill without disturbing it. He suspected Hex was assisting in some way. As DiMA worked, he explained, “Some of the ant hills have been infested with a sort of… invasive caterpillar that mimic the ants’ scent. They’re not doing any active harm right now, but the ants are feeding the caterpillars in addition to their own young, and it’s impacting Hex’s efficiency, so I’m aiding him in removal.”12 He dropped the caterpillar carefully in a nearby glass dish, possibly for release later.

“Ah. Helping him remove the bugs from his system, then,” Nick observed, smirking.

DiMA gave another of his faint smiles, this one slightly wry. “You could say that, yes. So what brings you here, Nick?”

“Just wanted to look in on you, see how you were doing, make sure the wizards weren’t… ‘pawing’ at you any more than you wanted to be pawed.” Nick had his doubts that DiMA had much interest in being pawed by the wizards here, but if he did, who was Nick to judge?

DiMA nodded. “I am… as well as can be expected, I suppose,” he said, appearing to miss any innuendo in Nick’s last statement. “I am… adapting,” he added, something in his subdued tone suggesting that he was struggling with that adaptation more than he wanted to let on. “There is much I still have to learn about this world, although… space in which to learn it remains an issue.”

Nick reflected that that was kind of odd. After all, DiMA had not, as he had thought, started existence as a machine to be used for studying the development of machine intelligence. He started existence as a _story_ of that machine. He ran up against memory limitations because that had been a part of his story, but the story wouldn’t have included every little bit of data that was occupying those crowded memory files, would they? And yet, now that he was real, he still ran up against the same limitations. Nick probably did, too, but his system’s way of dealing with the problem appeared to be, ‘Just write over the oldest, least used bits first,’ so that it was never a conscious process with him. 

All of this really begged the question: now that they were ‘real’, just what was it that was filling up DiMA’s memory systems?

“I can see how that would be a problem,” Nick observed.

“Indeed. Fortunately, Hex thinks he has a way to… expand my storage capabilities.”

The detective’s optics widened in alarm. “Hex thinks - DiMA, you’re not talking about using magic to upgrade your storage, are you?” Back in the game, Nick had found evidence that some of the procedures that DiMA was using to expand his memory were potentially dangerous, and his head scientist, a synth named Faraday, had cautioned him against it, even while helping him to go through with it. “DiMA, that’s a _terrible_ idea! Magic in this world’s unpredictable. There’s always a price, and once you’ve changed yourself with magic, the long term effects…”

DiMA gave Nick another of his faint, patient smiles. “Nick. We were _made_ through magic. If there are lingering effects, they’re already there.”

“Not necessarily. Taking out one loan doesn’t mean you’re not getting in over your head when you take out a second.”

DiMA dipped his head as he considered this. “You do raise a good point. I will… take your concerns under consideration,” he said, and while he sounded sincere, Nick got the feeling that there was an unspoken, “and then do exactly what I was planning to do, anyway.”

DiMA then continued, possibly to cut off further objections from Nick, “And how have you been, brother?” He looked the other synth up and down, catching sight of the badge that Nick had neglected to remove once his shift had ended. “You’re with the Watch. Are you certain that’s wise? It might make it more difficult to… let go.”

“I like the Watch,” the detective shrugged, and really, it was true. As soon as he was off traffic duty, Nick thought he might genuinely enjoy his new duties, and most days were busy enough that… well, he still thought of Sam rather often, but keeping busy helped. In Ankh-Morpork, the Watch did more of what Valentine enjoyed doing, such as missing persons cases and murders, than private eyes did. Did Nick want to be paid to find blackmail material on opera stars? Not particularly.

“And you still have dinner with them regularly,” DiMA observed. A statement, not a question. The hint of disapproval was faint, but there.

“I like the boys,” Nick defended himself. “Besides, Lady Sybil insists, and that dame is damned difficult to say ‘no’ to.” 

DiMA allowed a small, wry smile. “I… might have noticed that about her,” he conceded. Then he tilted his head. “So… _she_ wants you around? Does she k-”

“Yeah, yeah, she knows,” Nike interrupts, waving away the question with his skeletal hand. “She just… says she wants another synth around. For Shaun. As a, uhm, a role model, of sorts.”

DiMA gave what was, for him, an unusually broad grin, which meant that his faint smile was slightly less faint than normal. “That is an excellent idea, Nick,” he said warmly, and he sounded genuine. Back in the game, DiMA had wanted to serve as an example to the other synths, and had wanted the same for Nick. Nick had no interest in being anyone’s role model, he just wanted to do what good he could when he had the chance to do it. For some reason, it never really occurred to him that was an excellent trait in a role model.

Valentine sighed, part exasperated, part resigned. “Wish I thought so,” he muttered. 

DiMA continued to look slightly amused for a moment. Given how restrained his emotional expressions were, he never looked more than slightly anything. Then he sobered. “I am glad that you are able to spend time with Shaun, but… this does make things more complicated.”

Nick glared at his brother. “Thank you, DiMA,” he snapped. “I wouldn’t have noticed that without your help.”

DiMA continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “You need to let the human go, Nick. I know that you two were… close, but that… that wasn’t even real.”

Nick’s amber optics flashed brightly at DiMA’s words. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve, trying to tell me that! What the hell would you know? You’re just some… some story of a machine that never could understand what it’s like to be human! I may not be human, but with these memories in my head, I’ve got no choice but to understand!” The words hurt them both. DiMA’s comment had gone straight towards the center of many of Nick’s doubts about his realness, and when he spat the accusations of being a story at DiMA, it was as if he was trying to unload those same worries from himself.

The other synth actually recoiled at the verbal onslaught. “I am… sorry, brother,” he said quietly. “You are, of course, correct. I do not, can not understand what you’ve been through.” He tilted his head and put down the tweezers, reaching for Nick’s arm in an attempt to offer comfort, a motion copied from the more human Gen 3’s with which he was familiar. “It was wrong of me to judge.”

The anger went out of Nick and he deflated a little. “Yeah, well… I’m sorry I snapped. I guess it just… it is what it is.” He smirked faintly. “You’re… not the only one who’s still adapting.” Then he grinned. “But tell you what. I’ll take your concerns under consideration.” And then do exactly what he was planning to do, anyway.

12 Hex typically operates best when there _are_ bugs in the system, but [there are exceptions.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13139-parasitic-butterflies-fool-ants-with-smell/)

* * *

Sybil had seen to it that a birth certificate had been produced for Shaun, an impressive feat of legal gymnastics on Morecombe’s part. They all knew that Shaun hadn’t been born, precisely, but there needed to be something in the parish record, which was, incidentally, the parish of the Wizard’s Quarter, which answered to no god, because that was, first, where Shaun had been created and, second, where Sam and Sybil had married. Sam didn’t regularly attend any church, though Sybil sometimes dragged him down to the Interdenominational Temple of Small Gods, where she attended the weekend service regularly.

Then she worked on enrolling Shaun in school. It was midway through the year, but aside from Year 3, taught by Miss Susan, which young Sam was in, the Frout Academy For Enquiring Young Minds didn’t really assign much homework. Shaun would have no difficulty at all in catching up, Sybil assured Miss Frout. After all, Sybil herself had an impressive home library, and she’d make sure that Shaun read up on the history of Ankh-Morpork. He would know about, if not his exact ancestors, Sybil’s ancestors.

But in the end, it was $300 a term, and if Sybil wanted to pay that to fit Shaun into an incomplete term of Year 6, she could certainly be humoured. Shaun wouldn’t even need to take the entrance exam. After all, he came from a good family.

With good money.

Her Sam would have been furious, Sybil was sure.

Arrangements made, she was walking out with Shaun in tow. Sybil passed by Miss Susan in the hallway. Miss Susan gave Shaun the strangest look. The Duchess of Sto Helit was an odd one, who chose to work as a teacher and leave the running of her estates to her staff. Sybil supposed that Miss Susan must enjoy the work, as Sybil did with her dragon breeding. Young Sam liked Miss Susan’s class, in any case. He came back with the most vivid stories. It was a shame that Shaun was too old and would never have Miss Susan as a teacher.

Still, what had Miss Susan seen while looking at Shaun that had given her such pause?

* * *

Sybil had arranged a going-away party for Garvey, who was leaving the next day for his new job as a guard defending the construction of clacks towers. The Grand Trunk had aspirations of a line that went all the way past Wyrmberg to Smork, and if they were able to pull it off, then Sybil just might succeed in dragging the family off to Wyrmberg for a vacation, as she had long been threatening. Rumour had it that _Draco nobilis_ still flew the skies of Wyrmberg, due to its extremely high magic field, and if that was the case, Sybil had a stack of notebooks ready to be filled. If not, Vimes would probably find a murder or a corporate corruption scandal. It’d be a jolly good time, either way.

In attendance were Preston Garvey, the man of honour, Piper Wright, Natalie Wright, Nick Valentine, Deacon, Sybil as hostess, and, of course, Vimes. Codsworth circulated about, largely in Willikins’s shadow, but he did have a tray of canapes to distribute. Strong was still busy learning from Detritus at the Lemonade Factory, and in any case, Strong and Garvey were not close. DiMA had not been invited, ostensibly because Garvey didn’t know DiMA, but Vimes had been forced to concede to Sybil that they’d have DiMA over at some point, because she wanted to see what the third synth in Anhk-Morpork was like. Nat was allowed to go play with Shaun and young Sam, under Purity’s watchful eye. Dogmeat mysteriously arrived, fashionably late, snagged a devilled egg from Codsworth, and settled in to play with the children.

Vimes noticed the Watch Badge #322 on Dogmeat’s new collar, and he asked, frowning, “Did you do that, Nick?”

It wasn’t a terrible idea. Dogmeat was his own dog and wandered about, and a Watch badge would make Dogmeat less of a target for Furriers, not least of all because people might start thinking Dogmeat was a werewolf. Vimes had been wanting a proper canine unit, one beyond Angua, for years, anyway.

“No,” said Nick, shaking his head.

“Hmm,” said Vimes, and he made a mental note to have Pessimal check through the expenses paperwork to see if they _had_ added on a proper canine unit when he wasn’t looking. He thought they might have hired on another werewolf aside from Angua… it was all getting too big to keep track of, and all there was for it was to delegate pieces, so he knew which people were keeping track of which pieces, even if he didn’t know exactly what the pieces were, anymore. There was something else he wanted to run by Pessimal, come to think of it.

“Dogmeat looks good in a uniform, General,” Garvey said, watching the dog play with the children, as one of Sybil’s more elderly house dragons patiently waited for someone to drop a fork, so he could eat it.

Vimes screwed up his face with displeasure. He wasn’t a soldier, and he would never be a soldier. He said, “Preston, don’t. I’m not a general. I’ve never been a general. If you _have_ to call me by some military-sounding title, why not Commander? It has the actual benefit of being an actual title that I actually possess.”

Valentine grinned and leaned over, a glass of Sybil’s favourite sherry held elegantly in his metal hand. “Besides, it’s my understanding that the whole ‘Duke’ thing trumps being ‘General.’”

Vimes warned, “Nick-”

Valentine continued, “The proper form of address there-”

“Don’t you dare-”

Valentine concluded, “- would be ‘Your Grace’.”

“Nick!”

Valentine sipped his sherry, unrepentant, and he gave Vimes a level gaze that seemed to suggest that if Vimes wanted to shut up Valentine, he knew exactly how to, and if Vimes wasn’t taking that particular action, that was on Vimes, not Valentine.

But no, surely, Vimes was projecting. Valentine was decent and upstanding. He wouldn’t desire a married man. Vimes had lost him. A thought worried at him, though, which was that Preston had made an advance on him, which had been ridiculous, given the difference in both their ages and their life experiences, but Preston had made an advance on Vimes, knowing that Vimes was Valentine’s boyfriend, and Preston… Preston was a decent chap.

Vimes gloomily accepted the devilled egg that Codsworth proffered to him, as Codsworth said, in a misguided attempt to cheer up his master, “Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.”

Valentine groaned and said, “I think I’m the only one here who could understand that joke, but that was bad, Codsworth.”

Eventually, they all ended up playing Cripple Mr. Onion. Garvey needed the rules explained to him, and he wasn’t very good at it, but he was good natured about his losses. Deacon already knew how to play, and he was very, very good at it. In fact, Vimes suspected that Deacon was holding himself back and was, in fact, better at Cripple Mr. Onion than he was letting on. Valentine was quite decent. His card-playing face was largely unreadable, and he had a good memory for patterns and numbers. He was also quite unafraid to call out Deacon when his keen eyes caught Deacon cheating.

So Vimes guiltily slipped his spare Ace back up his sleeve. A bit of trickery with cards lost its appeal when Valentine was watching.

Piper wasn’t exactly good at bluffing, but she did look the same when she was telling the truth and when she was bluffing, and that made her unpredictable. She took a few hands of cards that way. Sybil, though, was tactically ruthless at cards with her diplomat’s mind, which Vimes knew, but which came as rather a sharp shock to anyone who’d never played cards with her before. 

One of Sybil’s house dragons came around the card table, nudging up at Vimes’s leg and begging. Sybil noticed and said, “Oh, don’t feed him, Sam. I’ve been trying out a different diet on them, which seems to reduce their explosivity. He’s not starving. He just wants attention.”

The dragon disappeared under the table, and Valentine backed away from the table, rather abruptly, with the dragon and his jaws locked on Valentine’s ankle. “Uh…”

Sybil came around, tickled the dragon under its chin to get it to open its jaws, and scooped up the animal in her arms, saying sternly, “That’s not what we do with guests.”

Valentine bent, examining his ankle, and muttered, “Acid?”

“Some of them can be a bit corrosive, but for you, I’d probably recommend a Ramkin’s Optimist, they’re good-natured and seldom explode, or Smooth Deceiver, they’re also good-natured, and suitable for the smaller home,” said Sybil, “or even a Curly-maned Slottie, they’re amiable and seldom explode, though they do have a tendency to slimp.”

“Smaller home? Gods, I expect Nick has a postage stamp to himself if he has anything, and swamp dragons think he’s edible,” Vimes said, hoping to head off Sybil trying to convince Valentine to adopt a dragon.

“Y’know, I always wanted a pet Deathclaw named ‘Fluffy’,” Deacon said wistfully, as he angled his mirrored sunglasses in such a way that Vimes reckoned Deacon could probably see Piper’s cards while Valentine was occupied with his ankle and not watching Deacon. “So what goes into looking after a swamp dragon, anyway?”

As Sybil closed in on Deacon, Vimes reflected that Deacon had entirely brought that upon himself, and if Deacon was going to end up walking away adopting a Smooth Deceiver, it was only what he deserved.

Valentine tried to stand and was able to do so only shakily, with a clear limp, and he sighed, “It’s eaten through that ankle linkage. D… I’ll have to invest in thicker boots, once I’ve saved up, and I’ll have to see if I can scrounge up a replacement linkage somewhere. I - oh, I have work tonight, so I’d better go now. Preston, you take care of yourself, and make sure you write. I don’t want to hear anything’s happened to the Disc’s only Minuteman.”

“Hey, now, there’s not just me, there’s also the Gen… His Grace,” Garvey said, smirking.

Codsworth, who was still floating in the background, now with a tray of those little cress sandwiches, suggested, “Young Master Shaun might have an acceptable replacement in his collection of spare parts.”

So Valentine ended up hobbling off with Codsworth to the playroom where the children were, and Vimes considered. He had a few stimpacks left. Valentine wasn’t dying, but walking all night beat on a bum ankle was no treat. He excused himself from the card table.

When Valentine hobbled to the door of the playroom, Shaun looked up from what appeared to be the rescue of Captain Carrot from the Omnian Quisition, which was currently under the control of Dread Queen Nat. Shaun rushed over to Valentine and said, “Oh Da… Oh. Swamp dragon got your ankle, huh?”

Vimes became aware that Sybil was behind him, as she said almost inaudibly, “That wasn’t a swear word he caught himself from saying there.”

Valentine leaned on Codsworth for support, however that worked, as Shaun looked at his ankle critically and then said, “Oh, I can be useful! Father gave me a bunch of old synth parts he’d scrounged up before we… moved here. I’ve got a bit just like this damaged one. Let me go get it.”

Shaun returned with it and a toolbox, and Valentine and Shaun sat down together and talked through repairing his ankle, until Valentine was able to stand again without a limp, good as he was before. “Great job, kiddo. You’re a real little engineer, huh?”

“I still want to be a detective, though, like you. And Father, I suppose,” said Shaun. “You’ll be back again next week?”

“Uh…” said Valentine, looking hesitantly at Sybil and Vimes.

“Yes, of course,” said Sybil firmly, “and if I could just have a word with you before you headed out?”

They found a sitting room, and sat they did, Sybil and Vimes on a loveseat, and Valentine across from them, testing his ankle, rocking it back and forth.

“You didn’t put up any protest over Shaun,” Sybil observed, and perhaps there was just a hint of recrimination there. She wouldn’t give up one of her children, period.

“Well, I don’t know what you would have expected me to do,” Valentine said, weary and worn and defensive, “Get into a fight with Sam over the matter? What good would have that done? Look, with you two, he’s got two loving parents, a little brother, a roof over his head, food in his belly, books to read, a good education… if I had to raise him alone, it’d be tight, trying to pay for food, housing, a Dame school… and I don’t know what I’d do for babysitting, when he doesn’t have school and I’m working, and going back to housing, I had a Hell of a time finding someone who would rent to me, because the folk who rent to zombies can tell that I’m not a zombie, and there’s no one who rents apartments to golems. So trying to convince a landlord that, no, it ain’t at all sketchy that there’s a synthetic detective trying to look after this boy? Yeah, that’d go over like a lead balloon, I bet.”

Sybil had never, ever been anywhere remotely near a position where she would have needed to consider that, perhaps, one of her children might have a better life raised by someone who wasn’t her.

But Valentine was in that position, and he had thought it through. It clearly took Sybil some processing to understand. Valentine wasn't abandoning his duties. It wasn’t that he wanted the single, unfettered life. He was as heartsick as a heartless machine could be, but he was doing the best thing that he could for Shaun, which was, in his case, to step aside without putting up a fight.

Vimes found himself looking at his own feet. 

“Look,” said Valentine, “I feel like I got the bad end of a divorce, and I don’t even go in for divorce, personally. I’ll be around for Shaun as much as you two let me. But I’m serious about needing to get to my shift, and I’d like to give Preston another goodbye before I have to go.” 

So Valentine did. Garvey had finally managed to win a hand of Cripple Mr. Onion against Piper and Deacon, and his grin was infectious. Vimes cynically wondered if Deacon had thrown the game. Valentine headed off into the night. Vimes and Sybil settled back down at the card table and played a few more rounds, as Codsworth circulated a tray of fruit on a stick.

The night drew to a close. Vimes saw them all off. He, specifically, saw Deacon off, but that didn’t stop Deacon from still being there when Vimes turned around. There was a Smooth Deceiver, now named ‘Fluffy’, in Deacon’s arms, and a bag of dragon-care supplies slung over his shoulder.

“So, uh… Whispers. Y’know how I gave you that whole line about being a synth?” said Deacon, “And all the… lines, in general?”

“Why, every word from your mouth hasn’t been truth, pure as the driven snow?” Vimes drawled.

Deacon said, “The snow that’s been driven over by fifty carts, maybe. No, it’s… I don’t actually know what my past is. Or who I am. The wizards didn’t write that bit in. I’ve just got stories.”

“Oh,” said Vimes, who didn’t know what to do with that, although he wondered if Deacon was leading him on.

“I don’t even know if I’m human!” Deacon admitted. “Look.” He pulled off his sunglasses for Vimes.

Vimes looked carefully and critically at Deacon’s eyes, and he said gently, “They’re bloodshot. You need sleep, Deacon. I’ll have Willikins air out a guest room.”

* * *

Ankh-Morporkians were naturally mercantile, Valentine was finding. He’d observed that both on the job at night and when he had time off in the light of day. On the street, everyone and their dog wanted to sell him something, which made it frustrating that he couldn’t find a good cocktail bar that was willing to believe he wanted to pay money for a beverage. Valentine could go drinking at the Bucket, but the drinks there were, to be charitable, expensive for their inexpensiveness. He could go to that dwarf bar that Carrot had shown him, but all they did was ale and three colours of mead. Ankh-Morpork had a _thriving_ nightlife. He’d heard lovely things about some of the cocktail bars. He just wished they’d let him in, but no, if he said he was from Diamond City, people assumed he was a Genuan zombie, and zombies weren’t big drinkers, and the most well-known bar that catered to the undead, Biers, had looked at him and seen him as something worse than undead: unalive.

And the unalive didn’t buy drinks. Except Valentine wanted to.

He left when he was asked to, which was usually before he could even explain that he wanted to buy a drink. There was no reason for someone with manners to get injured. There were over 300 taverns and pubs in Ankh-Morpork, and Valentine was depressed over how many he had crossed off his list. There had to be some smoky dive bar with a lounge singer that wouldn’t care about the colour of his skin as long as his money was the right colour.

The Octarine Parrot, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, looked like something the parrot had vomited up, but inside, there was troll singer with a light and dark banded texture and a dark green dress that attempted to slink but was overall more slumping. She was singing to no crowd at all, aside from a few rats sitting at the tables13 and one troll slumped over a table near the stage. Despite this, she glared at him. Trolls had some ancestral beef against golems, which was a shame, because Valentine had found that he rather enjoyed the modern soul music that the troll women tended to sing.

The bartender said, in the most unenthused tone of voice that Valentine had ever heard, “Oh. You again, Lewton.”

“I think you have the wrong person,” Valentine said, walking over to the bar.

The bartender was slender, with slightly pointed ears, too-large eyes, a small mouth, and a triangular face. He looked like he was supposed to be beautiful, in a twinky, waifish way, but he just couldn’t put it together. He was cleaning the counter with a dirty rag, which really meant he was spreading dirt around. He gave Valentine a bored glance, “Huh. Guess I do. You’ve got the hat and coat, though. You buying? We’re out of rum.”

The drinks behind the bar didn’t exactly fill Valentine with confidence, but this was farther than he’d gotten at most places. He asked, “You have whiskey, straight?” He wanted a fancy cocktail. While Valentine was used to barrel-scrapings such as the Dugout Inn and the Third Rail, Ankh-Morpork was a big enough city that the opportunity should have existed for such fanciful creations as a White-crested Hornbill14, crafted of rye, allspice dram, elderflower liqueur, muddled guava, ginger, and chili. He was becoming resigned to the fact that if he wanted an artisan cocktail, he was going to have to make it himself.

“You sure you’re not Lewton?” the bartender drawled, bored.

“I don’t even know who he is,” Valentine said.

“Lewton should be easy to spot. He's always wearing that old hat and trench coat getup,” the bartender said, and Valentine was _sure_ he was being wound up.

“Please just sell me a whiskey,” Valentine said wearily.

“Oh, fine,” said the bartender, and Valentine gave him his money, and he sat down to listen to the singer, lighting up a cigarette. The whiskey was bad. He might have to have a whiskey chaser to wash it down. But there was live music, and no one was pestering him. This all would have been fine. He was, in fact, thinking about hitting up the Monuments later.

The trouble came as the singer was leaving. There were many trolls in the Watch, and Valentine had learned that trollish was a very physical language. A bash to the head could be a, ‘How do you do?’

But something boiled Valentine’s coolant about the way a spacy-eyed troll, clearly strung out on Slab or Crystal Slam by the way he made Valentine’s Geiger counter click, wandered over and grabbed the singer, who clearly did not want to be grabbed. The high as a kite troll said, “You think you real woman, but you no want get hit on head.”

“Gneiss am real woman. Gneiss am _nice lady_ ,” she said scornfully, and she tried to pick him up with the arm he’d grabbed and pound his head into the stage. “No get hit on head by Slam addict like you.”

The thing about trolls strung out on drugs, though, Valentine was realizing, was that they just didn’t stop. They kept going past bodily harm, rampaging through a dreamworld. So when the drugged troll got back up and tried to suplex the singer into the stage, sending the rats scurrying, Valentine stood and demanded, “Hey, knock it off, dummy! You leave the lady alone!”

The drugged troll became aware, dimly, that there was something other than a fellow troll he could be punching, and he lurched at Valentine. Then there was pain, and a sensation akin to blindness or deafness for which humanity had no word.

So shortly thereafter, Valentine found himself explaining to the Watch Igorina why he’d gotten punched in the Geiger counter. She dryly, “Really. You got in between two trolls in a fight. Off duty. I think it’s your head that needs examination, not your arm.”

He said defensively, “Look, I couldn’t just let some lout lay hands on a lady!”

“So your guy-grr counter is broken?” she asked, examining his arm. “You have to understand, I’m much more about biologicals, but I’ve got a cousin back in Uberwald who worked for a mad doctor who dabbled a bit with clockwork. What’s a guy-grr counter do? Count angry men?”

“No, it’s like vision or hearing for me. I can feel radioactive fields, or I could, until I got socked in the Geiger counter,” Valentine started, and the look on Igorina’s artfully stitched face was of someone who was desperately interested in understanding, but he was going to have to use some different words. “Okay, so, there’s some… metals that are very heavy and dense, and when they break down, they turn into different things, and they release an energy that harms living tissues and unshielded electronics.”

Well, okay, he’d had her there, up until he said ‘unshielded electronics’.

“So you’re talking about things like pitchblende?” she said slowly.

“Yes!” Valentine said. “I can, well, could pick up the energy released by stuff like pitchblende. That’s what my Geiger counter did.”

“So like Mister Vimes’s new Dis-Organizer? Well, I think we can solder this back together, if you remember where everything goes…” Igorina started, and they did, but it wasn’t that simple.

The Geiger counter was physically repaired, but neither of them could figure out how to calibrate it. It would require a known dose of radiation, and while Igorina had some ideas about that, it would take a while for her to gather all the materials, and it also required leaning either on Commander Vimes, for his Pip-Boy, or on DiMA, whose personal Geiger counter presumably still worked. Neither option seemed ideal. For now, Valentine was just going to suffer, feeling like his optics were clouded and his audios stuffed with cotton.

13 The [Octarine Parrot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_SkNbWEm0&list=PL33199E7B5359D014&index=8) retains its traditional standards.

14 A creation of [Random Cocktails](http://randomcocktails.com/rc.py), which suggests 1.75 ounces of rye, 0.25 ounce allspice dram, 0.25 ounce elderflower liqueur, a muddled guava slice, a muddled ginger slice, and a muddled slice of chili. According to the generator, this drink is based on the Old Fashioned. Similar drinks include the Sazerac and the Japanese Cocktail. It contains 2 oz of base spirit and 1/4 to 1/2 oz of sweetener.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter provided by Six [(its sixxers over on tumblr)](https://its-sixxers.tumblr.com/post/619211138546188288/its-sixxers-finally-posting-some-proper), who did an absolutely stunning picture of Sally and Piper on their date. You're encouraged to go check her other stuff out!
> 
> A: The Watch is mentioned as having an Igorina in "Raising Steam", the last of the Discworld books. No mention is made of the Watch Igor. I will confess, "Raising Steam" has editing problems. Pratchett may have just meant Igor. However, there are a few notable things about the Watch Igor:
> 
>   * tries very hard not to lisp; and Igorinas are socially expected not to lisp
>   * doesn't want a Master
>   * has lots of modern ideas
> 

> 
> So I am concluding that the Igorina in "Raising Steam" is the Watch Igor from the rest of the series, who has finally decided to come out as being a trans lady.
> 
> Vimes is not 100% sure what's going on here, but he'd be fine with it, if anyone asked him.
> 
> A: There is a myth that Queen Victoria, who made male homosexuality even more illegal than it already was, did not ban lesbians because she didn't believe they exist. <https://www.indy100.com/article/forget-what-you-think-you-know-about-queen-victoria-and-lesbians--g1roYi86Cg>
> 
> A: After a double-read through of the Discworld books, there's a lot to indicate that the various sorts of queerphobias are rampant in Ankh-Morpork. Probably most notably, Pepe [Unseen Academicals], who seems to be gay, mentions that he had to get real good at running.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	6. Hands on Deck * The End of Try * Synthetic Man, Now with Artificial Flavours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Strange Activities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mnqMGx9VA&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=11) by Trent Reznor.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

Hands on Deck * The End of Try * Synthetic Man, Now with Artificial Flavours

Vimes had had meetings with Pessimal since he’d returned, many meetings. They weren’t terrible, as meetings went, but they were meetings, which meant they were still terrible.

“Did we get that canine unit?” Vimes asked, drumming a pen against his desk.

Pessimal admitted, “Uhm... apparently, I need to look more into that, sir. Now, I did want to go over the payroll summaries from last month...”

So go over the payroll summaries Pessimal did and then everything else that the Watch currently, this moment, needed from Vimes to continue functioning. Then there were Pessimal’s speculative projection charts, about things that weren’t problems yet but that he was worried might be problems soon. He had a lot of charts. They made Vimes worried.

There was a set of strange, unexplained murders that the Watch couldn’t quite tie together. With the influx of goblin immigrants who’d do menial jobs for menial pay, street gangs of formerly employed children were on the rise. The Smell Preservation Society was upset about how the coal-hungry trains were changing the nature of the Smell, and they’d filed a complaint with the Watch, because they’d filed a complaint with everyone. Those weren’t even the worst of it all.

As the meeting drew to a close, Vimes shifted uncomfortably, and he asked, “Could you do a favour for me? You don’t have to. You _really_ don’t have to. It’s not Watch business at all, it’s just something I’m curious about. A little ‘what if’...”

Pessimal said brightly, “I’d be happy to take a look at it, sir.”

Vimes rummaged in his desk and pulled out a folder he’d put together of various pieces of information he’d scrouged and notes he’d jotted down, and he said carefully, “It turns out no marriage is legal, at least if you find a dusty old lawyer in a fit of pique.” He pulled out his notes from his talk with Morecombe and slid them over to Pessimal. “But in practice, we ignore that. What would happen if molly… er, if same-sex couples could marry?”

Pessimal looked over Vimes’s notes without a flicker on his face. “In what sense? The High Priests of Io and Offler would be very offended, which comes immediately to mind, and then there is the League of Decency to consider, but you need to be more specific - from a law and order standpoint? Economically?”

“Yes,” Vimes said carefully, and then he shook himself. “From a law and order standpoint. And… economically.”

Pessimal took the rest of the notes and speculated, “I’ll have to run the numbers with and without the assumption that the Hedgehog Act and the Quirmian Butcher Amendment are in place. They’re currently ignored, but I suspect such a hypothetical could lead to a demand to see them enforced. This is an interesting thought experiment. Thank you, sir.”

* * *

Lady Sybil had successfully gotten Strong to come over to dinner. Lady Sybil had successfully gotten Strong to wear clothes, something intended for the more modestly sized trolls. Vimes didn’t think Lady Sybil was going to be able to get Strong to use utensils, but stranger things had happened. Vimes was both anticipating and dreading watching the attempt.

Strong had approached Shaun and Young Sam. Vimes tensed a little, although Strong had been around Shaun before without much problem. Codsworth and Willikins both moved almost imperceptibly closer. Vimes could tell by the way Willikins moved that he had readied something sharp and hidden, while there was a slight scent to the air that always accompanied Codsworth readying his flamethrower.

The super mutant crouched down to study the children. After a moment, he declared, "You littles. Probably weak." Willikins once more shifted very slightly, and Codsworth twisted his flamethrower arm slightly nearer. Strong pointed at Vimes. "You this human's littles?”

Shaun looked a bit confused, although it could have just been because he’d dealt with Strong before. "Uh, yes?"

Young Sam enthused, "That's my daddy!"

Strong looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “That good. You share?”

“Yep!” Young Sam declared, looking rather pleased with the opportunity to show what a good younger-older brother he was being. Shaun just nodded.

“That good, too,” replied Strong. “Should always share with brothers. Share make you strong! Should learn sharing, should learn smashing, and should listen to Commander human,” and here he pointed to Vimes. “Him good leader, smart. You do that, you become strong.”

The butlers, both robotic and human, relaxed almost imperceptibly as Sybil leaned a bit closer to Vimes. “He’s shockingly good with the boys. Perhaps we should continue to have him over from time to time?”

Vimes considered this. He compared the advice that Strong had just given his sons to some of the things that the nobles who visited from time to time had said in front of them.

Then he thought about what that Lord Olen Whitlock had had the gall to say to his face during his last visit, about how it was a travesty that he only saw the Vimeses every month or two while Lady Sybil had “that ratty undead flatfoot” over almost every week. It had taken Vimes a second to realize the man had meant Valentine and not Reg.

Vimes tried to imagine the look on Lord Whitlock’s face if he and Sybil started having Strong over on even a semi-regular basis. He smiled at the thought and replied to Sybil, “You know, perhaps we should.”

* * *

Vimes had to check on DiMA. He didn’t want to, but he had to, at least in part because he didn’t want to. He had a certain responsibility both for DiMA’s existence and his behaviour, and Vimes knew what it was to be a person with certain unpleasant inclinations. There was also the issue that folks might be unpleasantly inclined towards DiMA, not because of anything he’d actually done, but because of what he was.

Finding any given building on the Unseen University campus was a chore and a half, and then finding any specific person in any specific room was the rubbish icing on the gutter cake. Eventually, Vimes found DiMA in a set of graduate student offices, though the fact that one of the graduate students had hung up an Institute logo on his desk gave Vimes a start. He looked more closely at the desks and saw a small stuffed caiman, some dribbled candles, a _Barbarian Invaders_ poster, a Brotherhood of Steel logo on the next desk over, a Minuteman logo, and a Railroad ‘ally’ rail sign, all intermixed with occult nonsense.

DiMA was in a corner, on a stool that appeared to have been made from a giant toadstool, with a stack of papers on his lap. He greeted pleasantly, “Hello, Commander Vimes.”

Vimes looked from the Institute symbol to the Brotherhood of Steel logo to DiMA and said, “You look… well?”

Certainly, DiMA didn’t look like he had been taken apart or tortured, and Vimes hadn’t expected that, but he had to check. Unfortunate things happened to people around Unseen University, but it was almost never intentional.

“In a certain sense,” said DiMA, flexing his metal hand. “Physically, I am in somewhat better shape than the game narrative would imply me to be. Hex,” his gaze drifted over to a white mask on the wall, “didn’t make me _new_ , because that would have been too large a distortion of my hypothetical morphic field, but he did render me considerably less in need of maintenance than I would have otherwise been, insofar as Hex knew there’d be no one to look after me.”

Faraday wasn’t real. Vimes tried not to think about it, because a, ‘Sorry your boyfriend isn’t real’ card seemed both ridiculous and insufficient, and he didn’t think the stores sold those.

“Not so much of the rusty joints and patched power couplings?” Vimes asked. Valentine used to complain about those.

“Present, but… not so much,” said DiMA. He noted Vimes’s weapon-grade glare at the emblems on the desks. “It was a game to them, Commander Vimes. They don’t even think of me as the same entity as the fictional character that Zinon wrote as a creative writing exercise, which is… jarring. They will openly express, in front of me, _to me_ , that they wished they could have played the _Far Harbor_ expansion, so, in Chatur’s case, he could bring in the Brotherhood of Steel to ‘dispose of the malfunctioning technology’ and, in Alf’s case, ‘reclaim the Institute’s awry property’. Xian will blithely comment that he feels DiMA deserved to die for his crimes. The compartmentalization in their minds is fascinating.”

Vimes had been of that opinion, himself, but now, he wasn’t so sure. “You could, ah, leave?” Surely, they weren’t keeping DiMA here against his will.

“I could,” DiMA admitted, “but I would like to understand better how this universe works, and magic seems to be the starting place. I will confess I do find it somewhat… formulaic, however.” He glanced over at the _Necrotelicomnicon Discussed for Students, with Practical Experiments_. “For example, one can summon Death via eight wizards, each at a station on the point of a great ceremonial octogram, swaying and chanting, arms held out sideways so their fingertips just touch, dribbly candles, thuribles, and green smoke _or_ one can suffice with three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood _or_ one can skate by with two bits of wood and a fresh egg. Why?”

Bitterly, Vimes said, “It’s magic. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just is.”

“I think I can make it make sense,” said DiMA, with an unsaid _whether it wants to or not._

Vimes exhaled. “I would say good luck with that, but I’m not sure I mean it. Now, Sybil’s been wanting to properly meet you -”

“Why should she want to do that?” inquired DiMA.

“I suspect she is labouring under the misconception that we are ‘friends’,” Vimes said, grimacing, “That, and she wants to meet the other synth in the city. So you are formally requested at dinner this week.” He handed DiMA the hand-written invite. “There is a dress code, which mostly just means you’ve got to get dressed. Sybil had this tailored for you, off Nick’s measurements and some guesswork about the back.” Vimes then handed DiMA a paper-wrapped parcel.

DiMA opened up the sealed envelope, noting the signet on the wax seal, and took in the letter with a glance. Then he opened the paper parcel and unfolded a flimsy, pale silvery robe, spangled with pale gold lightning bolts, especially made to accommodate the large ports and vacuum tubes on DiMA’s back.

“If you’ve got any complaints about it, Sybil will explain to you why you don’t,” said Vimes, “Oh, and Nick will be there.”

DiMA undid the tie-strings on the robe and inquired, voice completely neutral, “Why do you torment him like that?”

Vimes choked. “Did he say something to you?”

“Not as such,” DiMA said, slipping the robe on, and he observed, “I don’t have anything to hide. Now people might think I do.”

“Really, DiMA? Nothing to hide?” Vimes pressed, suspicious.

“No,” DiMA said firmly. He circled ‘attending’ in red ink on the RSVP card included with the letter, and he handed it back to Vimes.

* * *

Sybil actually went and did it. She invited DiMA over to dinner. She’d even heard that DiMA was staying at the Unseen University, so she’d somehow contrived to have DiMA dressed in a thin silvery robe spangled with pale gold lightning bolts that had slashed sleeves and ties and more slashes and ties in the back to accommodate his unique silhouette. There was no hat; DiMA wasn’t a wizard, and he would have been in serious trouble, wearing a hat and not being a wizard.

Vimes reflected that he could not tell his wife his objections to DiMA without sounding like a crazy person. If he told her that DiMA was a murderer who had also sabotaged a vital public service and in addition was involved with very serious weaponry, she would, very reasonably, ask Vimes why he hadn’t just arrested DiMA. So the thing was that, just like Vimes was not a murderer and Nick wasn’t a murderer because none of those characters they’d killed had been real, DiMA was also not a murderer. Captain Avery wasn’t real. The fog condensers that DiMA’d put a backdoor into weren’t real. The hidden cache of Marine armour wasn’t real. The nuclear weapons in the Nucleus weren’t real. 

Vimes imagined trying to tell Sybil that his objection was that DiMA had a backstory as a murderer, and that was just even more daft, trying to arrest someone for something they had been written to have done but didn’t actually do as an actual person. In any case, it wasn’t even quite that backstory; it wasn’t quite just that Vimes knew what DiMA’s underlying inclinations were.

But DiMA was here, and there was a spot set for him at the table. Sybil, making an assumption based off of Nick’s proclivities, had seen to it that Willikins had placed a glass of sherry at DiMA’s spot. DiMA introduced himself politely to Sybil, and when Nick nudged him, DiMA made a fair if somewhat jerky approximation of the correct bows, and DiMA corrected his language with regards to how Nick addressed Sybil - as madam.

If Sybil kept having Nick over, though, Vimes could see Sybil eventually asking Nick to drop the ‘madam’.

Willikins was clearly trying to assess what sort of threat DiMA presented, and it seemed to Vimes like Willikins was having difficulty coming to an accurate calculation. Codsworth seemed interested by the presence of another mechanical lifeform in the house, but he was firmly in hired help mode and was staying out of the conversation. Dogmeat didn’t seem to think DiMA smelled particularly interesting, but one of the elderly dragons that Sybil kept in the house was eying DiMA as something potentially edible.

Young Sam was interested in whatever it was that DiMA was, and Shaun had at least an idea, saying, “Oh, an old Generation 2, like da… er, Nick, but it’s got some really odd modifications…”

“ _He_ ’s my brother, DiMA,” Nick said mildly. He wouldn’t snap at a child over a slip of pronouns.

“How are synths brothers? You were built, not born,” said Shaun.

Vimes looked at young Sam and Shaun, who were very much brothers and had been almost from the first instant they’d met, and he wondered how he was going to eventually tell Shaun that _he_ was a synth. Shaun had gotten over most his Institute prejudices with regards to synths quickly because he’d been entranced by the detective Nick Valentine, who’d been his father’s partner at the time, but he still had his slip-ups, like calling DiMA an ‘it’. How in the hells would Vimes go about telling Shaun that those people that Shaun didn’t always 100% consider to be people were actually what Shaun was?

DiMA said carefully, “Nick and I were built at the same time as prototypes to test new technology.”

“And DiMA here got me out of the Institute, and I, uh, was kind of confused at the time, so I said some things I regret, and… anyway, I ran back into DiMA when your father and I were on the Nakano case, and I decided to give the whole brothers thing a shot,” said Nick, who seemed to be editing the story somewhat because there were children present.

“I’m from the Institute!” said Shaun, and then he looked troubled. “But… it was doing some bad things, so my father had to blow it up. After he issued the evacuation order, of course.”

DiMA murmured wryly, “Oh, that was your solution?”

Sybil had heard all of that already, of course, but it also wasn’t good dinner conversation, and she deftly steered the conversation over to, “How are you finding Unseen University, DiMA?”

“With some difficulty. The buildings keep moving around,” DiMA deadpanned.

Sybil smiled, and gods, she was beautiful. “Yes, I’ve heard it does that.”

“What do you mean, the buildings move around?” asked young Sam. He had been there once, of course, on the day that Vimes had been returned to reality, but it’s hard to get a basis of comparison for moving buildings off only one visit.

“It’s magic,” Vimes grumbled. “There isn’t any explanation to it. It just does it because it’s magic.”

“Actually… there are at least two partial explanations, one of which is that excessive amounts of magic weaken reality and cause items to shift partially or fully into other dimensions, which is why the University is actually larger on the inside than it is on the outside,” said DiMA quietly, “and also the University is a _genius loci_ in the sense of being a living location, which is in part due to, again, the excessive amounts of magic, but also due to the fact that all places develop their own in-dwelling spirits.”

Ankh-Morpork was a woman. Ankh-Morpork was, in fact, a bitch…

“That… kind of makes sense?” said Nick, scratching the back of his head.

“Can you do magic tricks?” asked young Sam hopefully. He’d seen some particularly choice magic tricks on their last family vacation.

“Xian gave me his old deck of caroc cards and showed me a few tricks, because he is done with them and I am hoping to secure a position as the teaching assistant for Basic Sortilege next semester,” said DiMA, withdrawing a deck of caroc cards. DiMA shuffled the deck, his fingers moving almost too quickly to be followed, and he held out the deck to young Sam and offered, “Pick out a card, but don’t show it to me. Then shuffle it back into the deck.”

Young Sam did, and Vimes watched all of it warily. Normal battered old card deck, no sudden movements… DiMA split the deck, held up a card to young Sam, and asked, “Is this your card?”

Young Sam took the card from DiMA’s hand and grinned widely and flipped it around for all to see and proclaimed happily, “Justice, just like my dad!”

“Hey, let me do it, too,” said Shaun, and he took the deck, picked a card, and shuffled it himself.

DiMA took the deck, cut it, and held up a card. Shaun looked at it and said, “Yep, three of turtles.”

Nick had been watching it all about as intently as Vimes had, and Nick proclaimed, “DiMA, you’re just watching them shuffle and keeping track of where they put their cards, aren’t you?”

DiMA held out the deck to Nick, and he directed, “Pick your card, Nick, and I will turn my back on you and let you shuffle without watching you.”

Nick took the deck, and DiMA stood from his chair and turned around. Nick looked sidelong at Vimes, and Vimes caught that Nick had carefully removed one card from the deck and tucked it up his sleeve, though no one else at the table saw it, Vimes was sure. A cocky smirk graced Nick’s face, and he slid the deck across the table and said, “Okay, DiMA, turn around. Show me my card.”

DiMA turned around, sat back down, and took the deck, and Vimes noticed young Sam watching very intently as DiMA pulled out and held up a card: the Lovers.

Nick’s glowing amber eyes widened, and his hand went to his sleeve, where he didn’t seem to find anything.

Young Sam cooed, “Make the pretty purple-green sparkles happen again!”

Vimes felt his heart stop for a moment. Willikins had suggested to Vimes, at one point, that young Sam might have the makings of a wizard, but Vimes had blown off the thought. One had to be able to see octarine to be a wizard. Octarine was most commonly described as purple-green. Vimes stood, and he gestured at DiMA and commanded, “Come with me, DiMA. I’ll be back in a moment, Sybil.”

He took DiMA off to a study, closed the door behind them, and then demanded, picking the golem up by the upper arms and shaking him, “DiMA, what did you do to my son!?”

DiMA waited until Vimes put him back down and stopped shaking him before he said anything, and when he did, he raised his left hand to his head, like he had a headache, and he gave Vimes a mild look of disapproval. “I? I have done nothing to your son, aside from entertain him. You, however…” DiMA pulled out a small box of matches, and he lit one and held it in front of Vimes. “What colour is the flame?”

Vimes stared at the match. The flame was invisible. Then he squinted and looked more carefully, because he was suspicious by nature, and around the edges, there was a sort of emptiness. “Black. It’s black, innit?”

DiMA waved the match out and said, “Interesting. You, Commander Vimes, may be a carrier.”

“I’m _what_ ,” demanded Vimes, who was offended on general principles.

“Heredity is a complicated matter, especially here, but you may be aware that some traits may run in a family line, laying latent until the right union of blood is brought together. Commander Vimes, the flame is, as your son would say, purple-green, but most people would say it is invisible, yet you see it as black. You are not magically inclined, but the trait may be latent in your blood and, I would assume, that of the Lady Sybil,” explained DiMA.

“You’re saying my son can see octarine and it’s my fault?” Vimes sputtered, one of his eyes twitching madly.

“I would not phrase it that way,” DiMA said mildly.

Vimes threw his arms up and stalked around the study, fuming, “Young Sam can’t be a wizard! He’s _good_ with girls!”

DiMA observed, “Young Sam is seven. I am fairly sure that you mean he has social skills.”

* * *

Sybil was outside with her dragons, checking Lady Bindlespoon Joy of Duplicity for blue spot when her Sam came by and checked on her. That wasn’t unusual. The only thing notable was that this was the third time in ten minutes. Her Sam was clingier than she remembered him being, if he was afraid something would happen if he let Sybil out of his sight.

It wasn’t just her Sam. Indeed, Sybil had made certain observations and was uncertain what to do about them. One was that Shaun was a clingy child and rather desperate to please. He seemed to be terrified of being abandoned and that he would lose all that he had. So he worked hard in school, even if there wasn’t much to work at and even if the other children in Year 5 didn’t do much of anything. If anything broke around the house, he’d try to fix it. He was so, so happy whenever his father came home and so, so worried whenever Vimes didn’t make it home, even if he let the boys know in advance that work would be keeping him. He was also overjoyed whenever Sybil had Nick Valentine over, and she still caught him trying to call Nick Valentine ‘Dad’ over a month out. Shaun accepted her and seemed happy enough to call her mother, and he seemed to be in every respect a loving, dutiful son. He cleaned his half of the room without asking, and he’d come down and help her muck out the dragon stalls if she asked. It was just that, on some level, he seemed to mourn that he’d been forced to lose his dad in order to have a mother.

Sybil supposed she couldn’t blame him there. Ramkins - and surely there was Ramkins in his blood, synthetic though it might be - kept what they had. Valentine, for his part, seemed to be worth keeping. He was polite, respectful, funny, practical, and certainly seemed to work hard. Sybil could start to see why her Sam had fallen for Valentine.

She didn’t doubt that her Sam still loved her. If anything, Vimes made more of a point to be home for family than he’d done since before the railroad had taken him away, and he, like, Shaun, was clingy, clingier than she remembered him being. He limpeted to her like he was afraid the waves would wash her away. Sybil didn’t mind Vimes being a bit more careful and cautious, and she definitely didn’t mind him being more physically affectionate with her and checking on how she was doing more often.

Vimes was also, startlingly, somewhat more agreeable to Sybil’s social suggestions. Sybil had put three society parties on his schedule since he’d been back, and he’d only missed one due to work, and at the other two, he’d made it through at least three-quarters of the party before he’d vanished off into a shadow, when usually, he was doing well if he only vanished at the halfway mark.

It would have almost been nice, if he didn’t seem to be absolutely terrified of losing her. Sybil noticed, even if Vimes thought she didn’t. She’d tried to reassure him that she wasn’t going to leave him over his mistake with Valentine. Sybil tried to show her faith that Vimes wasn’t going to do anything further by _encouraging_ Vimes to continue with Valentine, as a friend. The gods knew, Sam Vimes could use some friends. She watched how he interacted with Valentine, and nothing she saw in those interactions made her concerned about any physical affair. 

No one acted that hungry when they were getting regularly fed. 

Wherein lay the problem. Vimes wasn’t getting over Valentine. He would absolutely panic and insist that he loved Sybil - which she didn’t doubt, that wasn’t the issue at all - if she raised the issue, but every time Valentine left, Sybil could see that her Vimes was pining over someone he couldn’t have. Maybe if Valentine really had gone away to Fourecks, like he’d planned, that would have helped Vimes get over him, but it would have been cruel to deny poor, uprooted Shaun one of the important adults in his life.

Sybil was starting to wonder if Vimes having an affair wouldn’t be easier on all of them.

* * *

“DiMA, you never drink so much as a nip, do you?” asked Alf, who’d finished up on a careful study of the thaumotologic effects of different stuffed reptiles.

“No. It would be an affectation and symbolic gesture of assimilation on my part,” DiMA replied. He could drink, he thought, the way that Valentine did, and he could probably process ethanol as auxiliary fuel, but he wasn’t human, and he had no desire to pretend to be.

“You’re always sober, then,” Alf concluded.

“I would not be inebriated even if I did imbibe,” said DiMA. The story of the fictional character DiMA building a mind for himself did not include said DiMA learning how to interpret the physical feedback his body produced when breaking down ethanol as a trigger that would cause him to temporarily scuttle his primary and secondary logic routines.

“Damn,” said Alf, impressed, “Right, so, you’re comin’ with me and some of the boys down to the Mended Drum and walking us back when we’re done.”

‘Some of the boys’ included some young wizards, even younger than Alf, who were called Eledalf, Dhurnas, and Rudus. DiMA had only the foggiest general concept of human drinking culture, having no scripted reason to ever go to the Last Plank, but ethanol consumption was clearly a key part of human social interactions in Ankh-Morpork. 

The Mended Drum had an interestingly scripted quality to it. The fights were scheduled, and the opening words and blows were pre-planned, but from there, the Drum had an elaborate scoring system, which factored in loss of limbs. Most fighters were tattooed with their names, so that lost pieces could be attached to the correct fighters. The human doing the reattachment was a specialized human called an ‘Igor’, who had given DiMA a curious glance back, as DiMA watched the clean up of the last fight from his barstool. DiMA wondered how Igor reattached the nerves with so little trouble, as easily as if he were soldering torn wires back into place.

At the bar, DiMA ended up sitting in the middle of the cluster of wizards, and some drinks ended up in his general vicinity, but he would gently slide them to his left or right, where unwary student wizards would grab them. 

“See, we’re all in Mrs. Widgery's Lodgers,” said Alf, gesturing at his younger friends. “Y’can tell by the colour stripe on our hems.”

DiMA asked, with perfect innocence, “Grubby?”

“Brown! But not brown like Archchancellor Ridcully the Brown, that’s a different sort of brown,” corrected Eledalf.

“Mrs. Widgery's Lodgers is the oldest Order, y’know,” added Dhurnas, with pride. “People think it’s the Ancient and Truly Original Sages of the Unbroken Circle, but they’re really just the Illuminated Mages of the Unbroken Circle by another name, and they’re really new.”

“What are the Orders, anyway?” asked DiMA, sliding something pink with an umbrella, which was gently wafting smoke, over at Alf, who picked it up without thinking.

“They don’t mean much these days,” Rudus dismissed.

“They’re important for sports,” said Durnas.

“And it’s where we have our dorms,” said Eledalf, “which we’re supposed to be in right now. It’s past dark. If the Bledlows catch that we’ve been out, we’ll be in for it. Now, Rudus got us caught last time -”

“Did not! You should have run faster!” said Rudus.

“Well, I did run faster, and you both ratted me out,” sulked Durnas.

“And that’s why I brought DiMA. He doesn’t think. I mean, drink,” said Alf, smugly.

DiMA considered. “You are saying that I need to break the four of you, in your varying stages of inebriation, back _into_ Unseen University without the Bledlows noticing?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” said Alf, finishing the pink drink, the smoke now burbling from his nose.

DiMA laced his fingers together and flexed them. “Interesting.”

* * *

Lady Rust was used to getting what she wanted. She’d enjoyed playing that peculiar little game that the wizards had put together, and the thing that she understood was that the lesser classes were always aping their betters. If she wanted to play that icono-game, then the lesser classes would want to play a lesser version. That was the way of things. The lesser classes did have some money, not much, and that money would clearly be better off with its own kind. It could keep company with all the rest of Lady Rust’s money. If she could sell them a watered-down icono-game, then that money could be hers. It did not trouble her that she did not possess an icono-game.

“I am certain that business with the wasps was merely a regrettable misunderstanding,” said Lady Rust, sitting at tea with two wizards.

This time, she’d approached the situation differently. Lady Rust had approached the Archchancellor first, congratulating him on his excellent leadership and how well his underlings reflected upon him, that they’d put forth that interesting little icono-game, and was he interested in a donation for a new bequest? So she’d quickly found herself at tea with Archchancellor Ridcully and that Mister Stibbons. Wizards weren’t good at listening, but they could fake it when money was involved, especially when the money was important for keeping more cheeses in their cheese board. 

“I imagine Mister Stibbons has the bugs out by now,” said Ridcully, slapping Ponder on the back.

“Erm, no, sir. The bugs are a feature, not a defect,” said Ponder, staring down at his clipboard, covered in arcane symbols that meant nothing to Lady Rust.

Lady Rust chose to ignore that, telling herself that Mister Stibbons was only an academic shut-in who wouldn’t know what eye contact was if someone poked him in the eye. “So. That icono-game. I quite enjoyed it. I should like to play it again.”

“That’s not going to be possible. I’ve forbidden it from being run again until I know exactly what went wrong with it and Commander Vimes. That sort of emergent systems behaviour could be dangerous,” said Ponder.

“So put a warning label on it,” said Lady Rust.

Ponder looked up at her, blinked owlishly, and asked, “Do you remember the 50 foot tall woman, Lady Rust?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” said Ridcully. 

“And that’s the problem,” Ponder said glumly.

“Mister Stibbons, Lady Rust is looking to make a significant donation to the university. Do try to be accommodating,” said Ridcully, in the tone of, _You_ will _accommodate her._

That was more like it, thought Lady Rust, pleased. Those young… youngish wizards might be uppity, but the elder wizards knew their place. “In fact, I liked it well enough that I should like to see if you could get running on those Dis-Organizers that everyone’s running around with these days.”

“Most people aren’t, actually, Dis-Organizers are still quite expensive, and uhm, the technology’s completely different. Dis-Organizers can’t even generate a blit diametric,” said Ponder.

“Mister Stibbons. You will put your icono-game on a imp if the lady wants the game on an imp,” said Ridcully in a mild, gentle tone that suggested anything other than immediate acquiescence was going to be met with inappropriate application of Wow-Wow sauce.

And yet. Ponder said, “The bequest goes toward the GBT.”

It was remarkable. One could have skated on the ice in the room, and yet, the teacup in Lady Rust’s hand was quite warm.

“10%,” Ridcully argued.

“We’re on the verge of unravelling the fundamental underpinnings of magic itself. 75%, and I can hire on a research assistant,” countered Ponder.

“No, you can have a potato,” said Ridcully.

“50% and a potato?”

“No, just a potato.”

“Sir, you have to consider the blit devolution expenses, the cost of walking around and finding a new student when one gets dematerialized by mistake, temporospatial relocation fees… 25% and a teaching assistant.”

“You know where you are, with a potato, and you’re on thin ice, Mr. Stibbons.”

Ponder sighed, “10% and a grader?”

Ridcully said at last, “Very well, Mister Stibbons. You drive a hard bargain.”

* * *

Zinon guiltily pulled off the icono-game helmet when Xian hissed, “Mister Stibbons is coming!” Zinon scrambled to put the helmet away, and then he grabbed some papers away from DiMA to pretend that he was grading.

Ponder walked in, took the papers from Zinon, and looked them over, asking, “Oh, did you already get these graded? ...hmm. Good.” He handed the papers back to Zinon after flipping through them. “Now, I believe you all recall how I said that you were expressly forbidden from even attempting compile checks on the _Aftermath 4_ icono-game?”

“Yes, sir, we’ve absolutely not been trying to see if we can get it to run because I wanted to lure Tektus into a dark maintenance shaft with my Railroad character,” said Zinon.

“That’s a very specific thing that you have not been doing, Zinon,” Ponder said, frowning. “Anyway, we’re going to get it working again.”

“But it’s broken. You can’t get it to compile… not that I would know that,” said Chatur.

“And what do you not know about it not compiling?” Ponder asked, turning his gaze sharply upon Chatur.

“Er, well, it’s not the out of cheese error, we actually got in a really lovely Lancre blue, and that didn’t even work,” admitted Chatur.

“But it tasted a treat on the BBQ sauerkraut, cashew, hot cherry pepper, zucchini, and veal pizza15 that we had lying around, when we crumbled up the extra,” Alf said.

“Interesting in its complete irrelevance,” said Ponder.

“I would speculate that it won’t run because it is missing the files for storyline critical NPCs, but I haven’t tried to run it, so I couldn’t be sure,” said DiMA quietly.

“Ah. Well. Then. Get rid of the storyline. I want this to be able to run on an imp,” said Ponder.

“But an imp can’t even generate a blit diametric!” protested Xian.

Ponder said, “I have every confidence that you’ll figure it out. I’m so confident that you’ll figure it out that it’s the final for whatever classes of mine you’re in.”

15 Since the internet has inflicted a [Random Pizza Maker](https://dtc-wsuv.org/ssanders/finalproject/) on us, we are inflicting it on you. This example is described as follows: Crust: Regular; Sauce: BBQ; Toppings: Cheddar, Mozzarella Cheese, Sauerkraut, Cashews, Hot Cherry Peppers, Zucchini, Veal; If you eat this pizza: You're rather ordinary. You're a cowboy. An outlaw. But you are also unremarkable, moist, nasty, frequently chosen over others, a real firecracker, a poor substitute, and popular but a little messed up.

* * *

Days went by. If Nick had to put another clamp on another cart, he was going to scream. Luckily, he knew that he was going to be transferred off Traffic Duty soon. Before he could scream, something screamed first for him, and he would have sworn it sounded like a deathclaw. Anvilfoot went running towards the sound, which seemed unwise. 

It was, in fact, a deathclaw, and it shouldn't have been there, hoisting and upending an apple cart in Seven Sleepers street. Nick wanted a broadcast radio, rather than a receive-only radio on a world with no radio at all, but what he had was a whistle, which he blew. Anvilfoot charged at the deathclaw, dwarfenly oblivious to Nick's shout of, “No, that's a deathclaw!”

As he fumbled for his crossbow, he cursed his lack of a pipe revolver rifle. For how little good it would do against a deathclaw, it had to be better than a damned crossbow. 

He winced as the spray that had once been Anvilfoot misted his uniform. There was then a sound like shattering wood, and there wasn't a deathclaw anymore. Small splinters were now buried all over the place, and a small fire had been started by the friction of high-velocity wood tearing apart a deathclaw. Down the street was Sergeant Detritus, summoned by Nick's whistle, hefting what appeared to be a siege weapon. With Detritus was Strong, who seemed to be more inarticulate than usual. 

Nick busied himself with looking for Anvilfoot’s badge, so there would be something to show the late dwarf’s family, and he pondered what a deathclaw appearing meant. 

* * *

Garnock Anvilfoot was so focused on taking down the strange lizard-thing that had been rampaging through the street that he at first didn't notice that he no longer had a body with which to do it, at least not until he and his axes charged directly _through_ the thing.

He looked back, confused, but only slightly. Things seemed more distant and less pressing all of a sudden. "Well, that didn't work," he observed.

NO. IT DID NOT, said a voice that he did not need his ears to hear (which was fortunate, since his ears were no longer available).

"I don't suppose I can have another try at it?"

NO, GARNOCK ANVILFOOT. I AM AFRAID THAT WAS YOUR LAST TRY. FOR YOU, THIS IS THE END OF TRY.

The dwarf sighed. "I sort of thought as much. Still, no harm in asking." The dwarf finally looked up at the source of the voice, although here he knew what to expect. After all, he was a Watchman. In his line of work, you saw Death around from time to time. "Say, what was that thing, anyway?"

Death smiled. He had no choice, he always smiled. But somehow, this time, his smile gave the definite impression of a frown. IT IS CALLED A DEATHCLAW. A VERY POOR NAME, IF YOU ASK ME.

"Maybe it's... because it kills people?"

The skeleton somehow contrived to look offended. CONSTABLE ANVILFOOT, DEATH DOES NOT KILL PEOPLE. DEATH IS WHAT HAPPENS ONCE PEOPLE ARE KILLED. BY YOUR LOGIC, IT SHOULD BE CALLED A KILLCLAW.

"Maybe," mused the dwarf as he faded. "Still, doesn't quite have the same ring to it, you know?"

* * *

A few days later, after a thoroughly unexciting night putting tickets on carts, Nick was visited by Constable Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, who wanted to inquire as to the security of Nick’s immortal soul. Nick looked up from the ticket paperwork he was finishing up at the Watch House and said, slightly confused, “Uhm, thanks for assuming I have an immortal soul?”

A lot of people assumed he didn’t. Nick was often one of them.

“My branch of Omnianism does acknowledge the souls of golems,” said Constable Visit, very seriously. “In fact, I have a pamphlet explaining the divine proof of golem souls, if you would just look here.”

Constable Visit was an earnest person, but one could only handle so much of him at a given time, and with dead Nick Valentine’s memories of Catholicism, no, Nick did not want to hear about Omnianism. Cynically, Nick suspected that Visit’s branch of Omnianism probably only acknowledged golem souls so they could have more people to convert, mostly because he recalled that the Catholic Church had stated that, if aliens existed, that aliens had souls, for mostly the same purpose. He set down his paperwork - more than once, other Watchmen had commented on Nick’s neat handwriting and impeccable grammar and spelling. If only Ellie had been real to hear that. He said, “Hmm, y’know, that’s really interesting, but I need to go check on how Mr. Anvilfoot is doing.”

He did, actually. His former patrol partner’s husband was holding up about as well as could be expected of a dwarf whose husband had died in glorious battle with a fell monster, which was to say he was getting fabulously drunk and starting a bar fight every night, but there genuinely was a thoughtful basket of axes that all the Watchmen had chipped in for that Nick did actually need to deliver.

It was a funny thing. No one batted an eye at dwarven same sex marriages, mainly due to dwarfs often not acknowledging gender at all, but as far as humans went, it didn’t seem to be legal. There were, Nick was finding out, plenty of “spinsters” who lived with their “companions”.

In any case, he took the basket of axes, and he ran.

* * *

While going over the promotions paperwork, Carrot asked Vimes, “So is there something wrong with Lance-Constable Valentine?”

Vimes looked up from the paperwork that he was mostly signing without reading. Was there something wrong with Lance-Constable Valentine? “There’s something wrong with everyone,” he said indistinctly. 

“Something specific?” Carrot fished. 

Valentine had murdered a man in cold blood, Vimes supposed. The one and only reason Vimes had let that slide was all those other times when Valentine hadn't murdered someone in cold blood, even when it would have been terribly convenient. Oh, and it had all been fictional, in the end. “No? Why, is he causing trouble?”

“Keeps finding excuses not to wear his breastplate and uniform. Says it is against his religion, and I am quite sure Catholicism is not an actual thing,” said Carrot carefully. 

Vimes sighed, “No, no, Catholicism is an actual thing. That isn't just Ni - Lance-Constable Valentine being sarcastic.” He was dubious, however, that breastplates and uniforms were against Valentine's religion, which seemed faintly like Omnianism. “Anything else?”

“No. Otherwise, he's been exemplary. I’m just wondering if there is a reason why you let Lance-Constable Valentine continue to be assigned to traffic duty when his actual specialty is missing persons,” said Carrot. 

“Everyone needs to learn the ropes,” said Vimes, taking a moment to hold up his current piece of paperwork as if it was intensely interesting which it was not. 

“Lance-Constable Valentine seems to not only already know the ropes but may have also taken some advanced knot tying classes,” said Carrot. 

Vimes was glad that he had the piece of paper in front of his face, because he didn't want to explain why he was blushing. Advanced knot tying classes, indeed. 

“You wife invites him to dinner on a weekly basis,” Carrot further observed. “So again, is there something wrong with Lance-Constable Valentine?”

“No?” said Vimes again, putting the piece of paper down and signing it. Only that Vimes _liked_ him, and Vimes generally didn't like people. Maybe it helped that Valentine didn't think of himself as a person. It wouldn't do to show any sort of favouritism. 

“Good, because you just signed his promotion to Constable and assignment to Missing Persons duty,” said Carrot, which, looking at the piece of paper again, he had. 

* * *

“So what’s this about you not wearing your uniform and breastplate?” Sam asked casually as he stared up at Nick, who was stuck to his ceiling.

“Is this Commander Vimes asking or my friend Sam?” asked Nick, who was trying to squeeze his metal wrist out of the rope trap that he had stumbled into. Just when Nick thought he’d mapped all the traps Sam had in his house, Sam added more. Nick supposed that was probably the point. At least this was helping to keep Sam’s home security top-notch.

Sam frowned. “If this was Commander Vimes, I wouldn’t be asking, and you’d be on traffic duty until your wires wore out. I didn’t point this out to Captain Carrot, but I know for certain that your religion doesn’t forbid wearing armour on Octeday, because your world doesn’t have an Octeday. I do seem to recall your religion having something about lying, although maybe I misunderstood.”

Nick had, it occurred to him, never really met Commander Vimes. He’d met the Sole Survivor. He’d met Sam Vimes, distraught father and one-man battle-seraph of vengeance, who’d been his lover. He’d met the Duke of Ankh, who’d left him. Not so much Commander Vimes, who was ultimately his boss. Nick finally jimmied his wrist out of the rope trap, and once he had that out, it was short work freeing himself. He landed on his feet and answered, “If you have to know, it chafes, and look, you’ve seen what kind of synth flesh defects I already have. I kind of don’t want to wear them open any wider than they already are.”

“Oh,” said Sam, realization dawning in his eyes, as he had indeed seen _all_ of Nick’s synth flesh defects. “You know, I could have an armourer look into it for you, get some padding made or the breastplate rebeaten.”

“Or I could save up and do that myself,” Nick hissed, annoyed that Sam didn’t know Nick had already thought of that himself. He glared up at the rope trap. “I’m not a kept woman, you know. A kept woman would at least earn her own keep.”

Sam looked pained, and Nick regretted what he’d said, because he hadn’t meant to be hurtful, he really hadn’t. Sam said haltingly, “This whole… thing has been unfair to you.”

“I guess that’s how I know I must be alive then, huh?” said Nick bitterly, “Because life isn’t fair.”

But dinner was nice. Young Sam had a new book about toenails that he was finding particularly interesting, Shaun had built a clock, and together, they had taught Dogmeat how to bark the Ankh-Morpork anthem.

* * *

Vimes had forgotten about the hypothetical question he’d asked Pessimal when Pessimal showed up just after shift end, as Vimes was closing up a file folder and putting it away. They’d talked about other things since then, the strange murders, the Watch’s budget, the rising trend in imp tampering and how that affected evidence collection, and so on. Pessimal sat a sixty-page report on Vimes’s desk and said, “Your question about legalizing same-sex... interactions and cleaning up the marriage laws such that marriage is actually legal for everyone, as opposed to no one. It took me a while. I haven’t done an analysis with that many moving parts in some time. Do you have any other hypotheticals like that? It was good practice to stay in shape, sir.”

“Oh. Thank you,” said Vimes, recalling that awkward discussion. “You really didn’t have to…” He flipped through the report, looking for the nice bullet-form summary sheet. There it was, good old Pessimal…

“Would you like me to submit a copy to the Patrician?” asked Pessimal. “If you turn to page 16, you’ll see that while there would be an initial destabilizing effect and a sharp uptick in what could loosely be grouped together as ‘hate crimes’, overall, the city would enjoy an appreciable economic benefit. Particularly of note, weddings, with associated flowers, cakes, bands, meals, iconographers, hotels, tourism in general, suits and gowns, not to mention those one-off gowns for the members of the bridal party… and these wouldn’t be only Ankh-Morpork couples, the city would see a sharp influx of immigrants and tourists of some means who would find the city’s legal climate more conducive. Employers would be able to recruit and maintain employees who might have otherwise been susceptible to blackmail. Couples could pool income, which means more stable housing access. Preliminary analysis suggests that at least some such couples and other groups would be interested in child-rearing, which could take some of the burden off the Guilds and charities and incidentally could help reduce the number of children in street gangs, which would help curtail the street-to-Tanty pipeline. In short, I really think the Patrician should take the steps outlined on page 35 to remove the so-called ‘wham laws’ -”

Vimes’s eyes glazed slightly, as he tried to both listen to Pessimal and skim through the document. Eventually, his brain caught up with the first thing Pessimal said, and he said, “Er, no. Let’s not submit this directly to Vetinari.” Give Vetinari a choice between stability and money, and he picked stability every time. Vetinari was an uncommon Ankh-Morporkian in that sense. Besides, Vimes had poached Pessimal off Vetinari. The old buzzard would recognize the report’s style of writing, and he’d start asking some questions that Vimes didn’t want to answer.

But if Vetinari wouldn’t chase down money like dogs after a wounded doe, Vimes could think of people who would. They were the same ones who didn’t pay their damn taxes.

* * *

Constable Nick Valentine considered his new patrol partner, a Watchman from a small town in Uberwald named Bad Blintz. The Ankh-Morpork Watch actually didn’t assign permanent partners, but there were people who were regularly put on patrol together, and temporary partners during training periods were common. There were actually two Bad Blintz officers assigned to his Watchhouse right now, although they weren’t there permanently. Apparently the pair were already experienced Watchmen who had been sent to learn “the Ankh-Morpork way” and bring the knowledge back home to train others. Nick questioned the wisdom of assigning one of the Watchmen to him, seeing as he was still getting a handle on “the Ankh-Morpork way” himself, but not as much as he questioned calling this particular creature a “Watch _man_ ”. 

His name was “Artificial Flavours” and he was, in fact, a talking rat.

The robot detective and his talking rat partner. Synthetic man, now with Artificial Flavours. Nick was fairly certain he had just become the subject of some other dimension’s children’s show.

The two were investigating a report of a missing girl. She had been playing near her family’s room (they didn’t have the money for more than that) and had vanished. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that she had been down in one of the building’s cellars, or to find the recent hole in rotten wood that suggested she had fallen into… deeper cellars. From there, it looked like she had wandered off into the maze of under-Ankh-Morpork, probably trying to find a way back up.

They were in the process of following her trail, looking for more recently disturbed bits in the ancient tunnels, when Nick broached the subject. 

“So. Uhm. ‘Artificial Flavours’, huh?”

The rat, who had just managed to dig out a small scrap of fabric from the mud, worn but newer than anything else in the area, shrugged. “Sure. See, when we first started with the, you know, thinking and reading, we just picked words we liked the sound of from anything we could find, and since where we was was a rubbish heap, well…” He shrugged again, pointed a little further down the tunnel, and then, without asking permission, scrambled up Nick’s clothing to perch on his shoulder.

Nick considered that, given that his own earliest memories were of waking up in a trash heap, he was pretty fortunate to have wound up with the name ‘Nick Valentine.’

Nick glanced up. “Not sure I like this. We’ve got to be nearing the Cattle Market by now…”

Artificial Flavours brightened. “Pretty good sense of direction there!” he exclaimed. “We’re coming up on the corner of Pony Parts and the Shambles.”

Nick studied Artificial Flavours as well as he could, given that the rat was on his shoulder. “You, er, know this place pretty well for someone new in town.”

The rat made a dismissive wave with his paw. “Naw. Actually, we originally came from Ankh-Morpork. I mean, we the rats, not Jeffries.” Jeffries was the human Watchman who had arrived with Artificial Flavours. He looked around and sighed. “Tell you what, being back here reminds me how much I missed this place, though I was really just a pup when we left. Going back to Bad Blintz’ll be hard, but…” he shrugged. “See, the thing is, back home, the only rats around us are talking ones, so folks know to leave us alone, and if they don’t… well, by the Agreement, the Watch is there for us, too. Here, there’s too many of the non-talking, pesty types around. Folks are liable to exterminate first and ask questions never.”

“I hear ya,” Nick agreed, thinking about how often it had been the trench coat and fedora that had kept him from being mistaken for a standard issue Gen 2 back in the Commonwealth, at least according to his memories. Sometimes, clothes really did make the man.

“Yeah,” Artificial Flavours sighed. “Wouldn’t want to end up as the special in some dwarf delicatessen, you know?”

Okay, well, that was something Nick hadn’t had to worry about.

Artificial Flavours stiffened, and then Nick heard it, too. The sound of a girl sobbing in pain up ahead, and a familiar… chittering noise. 

Nick ran. Artificial Flavours stayed on his perch, opting for the moment to keep the improved vantage point it offered. Valentine barged through a door - a door? Had this been a surface-level building once? Had the tunnel been a street? And found her, huddled in a corner, swatting feebly at the oversized cockroaches gnawing at her.

Four very large cockroaches, one of which was larger than the others and glowing.

Artificial Flavours immediately leapt into action, quite literally, jumping from Nick’s shoulder onto and _through_ the nearest roach. Nick delivered a heavy kick to the glowing one’s side and underbelly, flinging it away and flipping it over. Next, he unloaded a crossbow bolt into it, having loaded it when he and Flavours had first entered the tunnels. After that, though, it was either take a moment to load a new bolt or resort to his Watch-issued truncheon. He opted for the truncheon, smashing it down on the glowing insect and finishing it off. 

While he had been distracted with the largest one, Flavours had torn through a second of the smaller ones. That done, a well-aimed kick took care of the final insect.

Valentine looked at the insect bodies scattered about, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. When he opened his mouth to voice his confusion, however, Artificial Flavours spoke at exactly the same time.

“Radroaches? Here?”

“Thaum-buggies? Here?”

The rat and the robot both blinked and turned surprised stares on each other.

“What’s a thaum-buggy?”

“What’s a radroach?”

They both stopped talking again, then Flavours encouraged, “Ah, you first, maybe?”

Nick nodded as he knelt down to check on the girl. She looked like she’d be okay, but there was a lot of blood where the roaches had been gnawing at her, and she had burns around the injuries caused by the glowing one. Things felt a lot less like some kids’ show than they had earlier. “Radroaches. Just… cockroaches that were mutated by radiation, made them bigger, tougher, and meaner. But that was… where I’m from.” Which wasn’t real. “Don’t know how they’d get here.”

Artificial Flavours considered this. “Almost sounds like the same thing, then, if you’re talking magic radiation?” He turned the sentence into a question at the last moment and peered at Nick.

Nick shook his head. “Atomic. You… I don’t think you guys get much of that here, outside the troll drugs.” At least unless something managed to make Codsworth explode. Why’d they have to use it to power every damn thing they made?

Flavours shrugged. “Similar to thaum-buggies, then, but you don’t get them in this part of town. Too far from the University. But near the places they dump their magic waste… well, it don’t always just turn us into happy cute little talking animals, you know. Sometimes it makes them bigger, or changes them in other ways, makes them… weirder.” He glanced at the body of the glowing roach. “The glow’s a nice touch, gotta say. That’s about the sort of thing I’d expect, at least on the low-key end.”

‘Low-key end’, huh? So they might be something that could normally be found in this city, for Ankh-Morpork’s own peculiar value of ‘normal’. That would make finding them here odd, possibly even worth investigating since it could mean there was some sort of… thaumic spill nearby that no one knew about. But if they were really radroaches, they had no business being on this world at all… perhaps even less than he did.

Once Nick was finished looking over the child he picked her up and held her carefully, patting her on the back in an attempt to soothe the frightened girl. “Okay, it’ll be okay,” he murmured. “Let’s get you out of here, huh?” 

Artificial Flavours clambered back onto Nick’s shoulder, this time trailing roach-goo over his clothes. The synth eyed the rat’s paws warily and pointed out, “You probably want to get that washed off.”

Flavours rolled his eyes in exasperation and retorted, “Oh, you think so? Thanks, Constable Obvious! I may be a rat, but I'm not a _dirty_ rat when I have the choice. There’s just nothing down here to clean it off in that won’t make it worse.”

Valentine snorted in amusement. Fair point. He’d probably be looking for a nice fire to burn what he was wearing, himself. He spared one last glance at the oversized insect bodies. They needed _some_ way to be sure, especially after that deathclaw on Seven Sleepers. This was starting to look less like a fluke and more like a pattern.

“C’mon,” he told Artificial Flavours, although it was unnecessary since the rat was already hitching a ride on him. “I think we need to talk to S- the Commander. See if the Geiger counter on that Pip-Boy he brought back with him still works.”

* * *

Constable Nick Valentine sent Artificial Flavours to get the girl's parents while he carried her to the Lady Syb free hospital to have her injuries checked, cleaned, and dressed. After her parents arrived with the Educated Rodent, he explained what had happened before letting the hospital staff reassure them as to her condition. Some of the nursing staff weren't particularly thrilled to have a rat running around the hospital, but Nick convinced one to let him wash up in a sink, and once he was no longer a dirty rat who smelled of sewer but a cute little cuddly clean fuzzy rat that talked, the staff was a lot more receptive of him, and Artificial Flavours was clearly enjoying the attention. 

Nick gave an exasperated sigh and lowered his left arm to let the rat climb up. It was apparently considered rude to pick up a talking rat without their explicit consent first, even if some of them had no issue with climbing onto a convenient shoulder without asking. “C'mon, Flavours, we're still on duty,” he reminded, to the disappointed “aw” of the nurse that had been cuddling him.

As the two headed back to Pseudopolis Yard, Artificial Flavours complained, “Yeesh, Nick, you really know how to cramp a man's style.”

“First, you're not a man by any stretch of the imagination, and second, we need to get back there with the Pip-Boy before something has a chance to disturb the scene.”

Flavours chuckled. “Yeah yeah, all right. Guess that was a good enough break.” He shook himself, splashing a few drops from his earlier sink-bath onto Nick’s cheek. “Seems a shame to go straight back into the tunnels after a bath, but that goo… itched.”

The walk from Lady Syb’s to the Watch headquarters took around fifteen minutes. Nick seemed to remember running from place to place in the Commonwealth much faster than it took him to get around Ankh-Morpork, even when he accounted for the difference in walking versus running, but when he tried to think about the actual distances involved, that seemed… wrong. He suspected that may have been a side effect of living in a game: the scales never _looked_ wrong when he was seeing them, but distances were somehow… compressed for traveling.

The two entered the ever-busy main-room of the Watch building, and Valentine almost winced. Either he had gotten very lucky or very unlucky, because the Commander happened to be in the main room at the moment, speaking with Sergeant Littlebottom as the nearby Corporal Shoe sat at his desk, apparently trying to sew an ear back on with the help of a small mirror. 

Might as well get it over with before Vimes tried to bolt. “Commander,” Nick said, trying to make it clear that yes, he had something job-related that he needed to talk to the man about. 

Commander Sam Vimes looked up and a mask slid in place as he tried to force himself to deal with Constable Valentine the same way he would any Watchman. “Valentine?” he asked, then he frowned. “You have a rat on your shoulder,” he noted, somewhat bemused. 

“Thanks, I hadn’t noticed,” Nick answered somewhat dryly, and Littlebottom stifled a giggle.

“Sir,” she interjected. “The Bad Blintz trainees?” 

That helped. Vimes appeared to vaguely recall being told something about that, but perhaps he’d been busy enough that ‘oh, yeah, one of them’s a rat’ hadn’t properly settled in his memory. “Oh, oh yeah.” He focused his attention on the rodent. “I’m sorry, I know I saw your name somewhere, but…”

“Constable Artificial Flavours, sir!” the rat answered, straightening in his position on Nick’s shoulder and giving his best approximation of a salute. Vimes’ expression remained impressively neutral at the name. “It’s an honor to meet you, Commander!”

“Thank you. That accent,” Vimes’ face looked thoughtful. “You’re not originally _from_ Uberwald, are you?”

“Right you are, sir! I was born here in Ankh-Morpork, used to live up near -”

“The University,” they both said at once, although there was a note of resigned exasperation from Vimes when he said it. “Right, of course,” he added, because really, where else? Then he turned his attention back to Valentine, even met the Constable’s gaze. “You wanted something, Constable Valentine?” he asked, careful and formal in a way that Nick knew he had to be while they were both on-duty but that nonetheless hurt.

“Ah, yeah,” Nick inclined his head slightly, now that the matter of yes, there was a rat on his shoulder, yes, he was supposed to be there, and yes, he could speak for himself was sorted out. “We found the Kitchingham girl,” Valentine had no idea if Vimes knew about that case or not, but if not, he could read the report later. “She had fallen into the unused tunnels underneath. She’ll be all right, dropped her off at the Lady Syb, but when we found her, she was being attacked by… well…”

“Well?” prompted Vimes.

“That’s the problem, S-ir,” Nick replied, only the barest hint of hesitation as he managed to turn ‘Sam’ into ‘Sir’ at the last second. “See, Artificial Flavours here thought they looked like thaum-buggies, but to me, they looked an awful lot like radroaches. I was hoping maybe the Geiger counter on your Pip-Boy could tell us the difference.”

“Radroaches? In Ankh-Morpork?” Vimes exclaimed. 

“That’s what we’re hoping to find out,” Nick answered. 

Vimes brought his left hand up to stroke his chin with his thumb, his right hand going to cup the other elbow, his eyes narrowed in thought. “I suppose I could see how they might seem pretty similar, well, depending on the type.” Thaum-buggy was a more general term, one that included any number of magically muted insects into a wide variety of forms, while radroach was pretty specific. Then Vimes dropped his arms and peered at Nick. “Assuming they are radroaches, any idea why this keeps happening around you?” There was nothing accusatory in the tone, which itself might have seemed curious to the Watchmen familiar with his natural levels of suspicion, had they stopped to think about it. But Sam seemed to be genuinely seeking Nick’s thoughts. “First the Deathclaw, now this…” 

“My theory? It’s _not_ just happening around me, I’m just one of the only ones who knows what to look for. This is a pretty strange city, it seems like a lot of stuff from… where I’m from might pass for things you could find here, as long as there was never too much of it together and you didn’t look too close. Crazy, mutated animals? Oh, sure, you’ve got those around the University. A solo raider who was smart enough not to start shooting while outnumbered’s liable to get mistaken for a barbarian ‘hero’ and pointed to the nearest bar without a second glance. Feral ghouls? As long as you don’t look too close, it’d be easy to assume they were the more shambling type of zombie-”

“What?!” exclaimed Reg from his desk, slamming his hands down on his desk in agitation and, in the process, accidentally flinging his not-yet-attached ear into the air. Nick deftly caught it in his metal hand. “That’s- that’s cultural appropriation, that is!” he protested. 

“Reg,” Vimes sighed, and Nick noticed that he used the zombie’s first name. Of course, that wasn’t really too surprising; Reg Shoe just seemed like a natural Reg. It was more or less automatic for everyone to address him that way. “I understand your concern, but this is really… not the time.”

“Ah, sorry, sir. It’s just so… frustrating. You work so hard trying to get people to see the person, not the corpse, and some… outsider comes in, just… shambling along - thanks, Nick,” Reg finished as Nick reached over his desk to drop Reg’s ear back in his hand. 

“No problem, Reg,” Nick switched to a more conversational tone. “Wouldn’t want you to lose that.” He was, after all, in a singular position to appreciate how difficult it could get to keep one’s parts in place.

“Yeah,” agreed Reg, leaning back in towards the mirror to restart sewing the ear back in place. “Igorina’s doing some interesting work with her… home-grown replacements, but I’ve never felt comfortable with her usual sources. I know they’re all about ‘what goes around comes around,’ but you never know if the original owner might need it again, you know? I mean, I sure wouldn’t have liked waking up dead and missing, say, a liver or similar.”

“Reg,” Vimes interrupted, trying once again to steer the topic back on track, “we really need to look into this.” Sam looked back at the synth and his diminutive partner. “C’mon, Nick, let’s get you that Pip-Boy.” 

* * *

As it turned out, the Geiger counter in Sam’s Pip-Boy was still working. Valentine was able to confirm that when it began clicking near the bodies of what were definitely radroaches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: The picture in this chapter was made for us by the fabulous [emma-heart-art over on Tumblr](https://emma-heart-art.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> S: Artificial Flavours is my fault. I sat down and thought to myself, “What is the most absolutely absurd thing that Nick could get paired up with while working on the Watch?” Then I thought about how talking animals aren’t even a particularly uncommon type of magic mutation, that there was a whole book about talking rats that ended with the stipulation that some of them join the Watch of Bad Blintz, and that the later books suggest that other cities sending Watchmen for training rotations isn’t uncommon, and that’s where Artificial Flavours came from. I actually assume that talking rats (and other animals) get produced regularly by the excess magic in Ankh-Morpork, what with “talking animal” being such a common trope that it’s one of those well-worn paths where magic has an easier time running. Also, given that the rats that ended in Bad Blintz all have “food package” inspired names, I assume that their batch contains a particularly high percentage of “natural readers” (even if their tiny hands makes writing difficult, causing the need to create an easier-to-draw symbolic written language). I named Artificial Flavours just by spending some time googling things that end up on food packages, and eventually landed on that. I could see Ankh-Morpork using it as a selling point, even. It wasn’t until I already named him that the ‘Synthetic man with Artificial Flavours’ gag occurred to him. I assume they were initially assigned together by someone (Sally) who understood what the words ‘artificial’ and ‘synthetic’ meant, was in a position to be writing the watchbill, and might be inclined to have a little fun with it (Sally).
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	7. Interview with an Educated Rodent * Sunspill * By the Pocketbook * Which Lucky Few

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Finding Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrAUpuyFoTU&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=12) by Zack Hemsey.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

Interview with an Educated Rodent * Sunspill * By the Pocketbook * Which Lucky Few

“Why don’t you have it running yet?” asked Lady Rust.

Ponder hadn’t really been paying much attention to what the group of graduate students who were working on the icono-game were doing, because the icono-game was a semi-amusing diversion. The GBT and the Challenger project were plumbing the depths of reality, and like any plumbing job, it was taking forever, and he had the faint concern that they’d made everything more plugged up than it had started. “Erm, so, Chatur was project lead…”

Chatur promptly wore an expression of Not It. No one had ever been less It than Chatur, his expression seemed to say. He wheedled, “Look, the imps keep having problems with blit devolution, and Hex is pulling unusual loads on the squash court.”

In a room close to the Library, which was mainly used to store older furniture, where Rincewind had once lived when he was Assistant Librarian, the store was somewhat depleted. Ponder had not noticed this.

“Oh, these… ‘dears’ are managing on their own?” asked Lady Rust, making ‘dears’ sound as if it was some sort of contagious disease of the foot.

“The Challenger project takes a lot of my time…” Ponder started.

But Lady Rust didn’t seem unhappy with this. She said lightly, “You know, with you being so terribly busy with such… important work, I did take the liberty of talking to the Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map Folding,” who was an expert on finding experts, “about if someone else might be able to supervise, while you’re so terribly indisposed. He suggested Kai Wathen, the Professor of Percussive Morale.”

“Does he know he’d actually be interacting with… students?” asked Ponder. Most faculty wizards didn’t want to have anything to do with students. He’d never heard of Kai Wathen, but he’d never met most of the faculty, due to the infolded nature of Unseen University. Ponder wasn’t good at delegating, but he knew he wasn’t good at delegating, and if someone really was willing to look after this icono-game business for a while...

“Oh yes,” said Lady Rust.

This seemed to be too good to be true and probably was.

* * *

"So which one is it, Nick?" Piper asked one day while chatting with him over lunch. Nick, of course, couldn't eat, but he usually enjoyed her company, and the habits left over from a previous lifetime (one that had never actually happened) meant that he sometimes enjoyed a good coffee. Say what you would about Ankh-Morpork, the coffee sure was a lot better than any centuries-stale beans you could scrounge up in the Commonwealth.

"Which one is what, Piper?" Nick replied, genuinely confused.

"Which of the Watchmen is a werewolf? Everyone knows that one of them is."

Nick’s expression remained one of mild confusion, but only because he had a pretty impressive poker face. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

"I heard it was that Nobbs guy. It is, isn't it? C'mon, Nick, you know I won't leave you alone about this."

It seemed like everyone assumed it was eternal Corporal Nobby Nobbs, the poor guy. Nick was well aware that it wasn’t, but he still wondered how people kept making this mistake. The only “wolf hound” seen with the Watch frequently had a bit too fine a coat for anyone to reconcile with Nobby, and did people really fail to notice that Captain Angua wore her badge on her _collar?_

But the only answer he had for Piper was, "We don't talk about Nobby's species in the Watch, Piper. It's rude."

"I hear he's got a certificate saying he's human. Who needs a certificate for something like that?"

Nick gave Piper a long, hard stare. "Really? I don't know, Piper, but I'm thinking something like that might have come in handy back in the Commonwealth."

Piper casually dismissed Nick’s argument with a wave and a “pffft” sound from her lips. “Please, if someone back home had been wandering around with something like _that_ , I’d have said, ‘Well, this guy’s a synth for sure!’” Then she smirked. “So can I take that as confirmation that Nobby’s the werewolf.”

Nick gave an exasperated sigh. “No, Piper, you can take that as confirmation that you need to stop asking me personal questions about the other Watchmen!”

In response, she actually brightened. “All right, Nick. In that case, can you tell me what you think about those rumors that you’re having an affair with Lady Sybil Vimes?”

Nick sprayed out the sip he had just taken of his coffee in shock. “What the _hell,_ Piper?!”

The reporter affected an innocent expression. “You said I needed to stop asking personal questions about the _other_ Watchmen.”

“I thought you were working for a real newspaper, not some yellow-journalism rag!”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a gossip column. Besides, you realize that around here, ‘real newspaper’ means something they set up five or six years ago and are still figuring out, right? We still can’t even get the tagline right half the time, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the dwarfen typesetters playing a joke at this point.” She grinned and gave a half-shrug. 

Nick took a deep breath. He didn’t really need to breathe, as such, but some of his components were air-cooled, and after Piper’s stunt, he definitely felt the need for a little cooling. “Anyway. I think those rumors are bullshit. And I repeat, what the hell?”

“Nick, she has you over there, what, once a week? Buys you new clothes, who knows what other gifts might be involved. Of course I know it’s all nonsense, I know that you and B-... I know that if it were _either_ of them… well, I mean. And I know you’re not doing that, either. I know you’re too good to do that kind of thing. But you’ve got to think about how it’s starting to look from the outside? What do you expect other people to think?”

People kept telling Nick he was ‘too good’ to do this or to do that as a substitute for actually listening to him, and he was getting _real_ frustrated. He snapped, “I don’t know, maybe something like, ‘Hey, I should stay out of other people’s personal business,’ or, ‘Hmm, maybe I should _ask_ someone about something before jumping to conclusions!’”

“You’re thinking people should ask you? Because I’m telling you people are going to start asking,” Piper pointed out.

“And if they ask me, I’ll tell them they’ve got it wrong.” Nick sighed. “Look, there’s not much to it. Lady Sybil’s decided that it’ll be good for Shaun to have another synth in his life as a ‘role model’,” he spat out the words ‘role model’ like the idea was personally offensive to him, “and she won’t believe me when I tell her that I’m a terrible choice of one.”

Piper’s expression softened as she let show a bit of fondness. “Well, I think maybe she’s onto something there. You’re one of the only people I knew from Diamond City who’d been willing to stand up for others,” she smiled. Then the smile faded and she shook her head. “I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about how it looked before someone who isn’t an old friend blindsided you, asking.”

Nick, having recovered enough to do so without his hands shaking in anger, took another sip of his coffee as he shook his head. “Guess I should have seen that coming, really. Kind of obvious how it looks. But really, it’s not anything more than it seems,” well, that wasn’t entirely truthful, but he wasn’t entirely sure what Lady Sybil was playing at yet. It seemed the woman’s poker face was even better than Valentine’s. He added wistfully, “I probably shouldn’t go, but she’s pretty hard to refuse, and, well… I really do enjoy spending time with the boys.”

Piper nodded, taking another bite of her curry. Once she swallowed, she said, “I’ll leave you alone about it, then.”

“Thanks.” Nick snorted. “Not sure why everyone feels the need to focus on tawdry gossip like that with everything _else_ that goes on in this city, anyway. You can get bad gossip anywhere, here we’ve got actual wizards, genuine undead and not just the simulated ghoul kind from back home, trolls, dwarfs, and who even knows what else. Hell, my newest partner is a talking rat! You’d think any of that would make a more interesting story than-” Nick realized what he had just said and clamped a hand over his mouth.

Piper started, “Not to these people, they’re used to i-” then she blinked. “Did you say ‘talking rat’?!” She was pretty sure talking animals were still seen as unusual in Ankh-Morpork, given how dismissive people were over the rumors about a talking dog in the city.

“No, Piper, don’t-” Nick began, but Piper was already gathering her things.

“Can’t talk Nick got to run but I’ll see you around later bye!” she said all in a rush, heading for the door.

“Piper, wait!” Fortunately, they had paid for their drinks and meal up front (few Ankh-Morpork restaurant owners believed in taking the risk of a dine-and-dash), so there was no need to slow down to pay, although Nick tossed down a shilling stamp (in addition to actual paper money, it seemed the locals were willing to accept stamps as currency) because he still wasn’t sure if Ankh-Morpork was a tipping culture or not, and darted out after Piper. If he had just thrown Artificial Flavours to her tender mercies, no way was he going to let his diminutive new partner face her alone. 

* * *

As it turned out, the interview hadn’t been nearly as disastrous as Valentine had expected. Bad Blintz was apparently a _tourist town,_ with the “educated rodents” their primary - indeed only - attraction. Artificial Flavours cheerfully gave her what was Nick suspected was a rehearsed spiel, chattering with her about the souvenir clocks (made by real rats!) and the regular performances, especially Sardines’s tapdance spectacular, and the rat shaped soaps and the toffee rats (not real rat, of course) and finished with an assurance that the training he and Jeffries were receiving at the Ankh-Morpork City Watch meant that Morporkians could enjoy it all in the same safety and care that they’d come to expect from their Watchmen at home! Possibly more, thought Nick, considering there was no Shades or Unseen University in Bad Blintz, but he kept that thought to himself.

Afterwards, Artificial Flavours explained to Nick that, given the influence of the Ankh-Morpork Times, Bad Blintz’s Mayor Grim had asked them to put in an ad in the Times while they were in the city, but this was even better because it was free and also somehow more official. He even _thanked_ Nick for setting it up.

Somehow that just made it worse.

* * *

Kai Wathen, of Llamedos and always slightly soggy like his home country, could have been a druid or a hedge wizard, a rather valued profession pursued by wizards of the arboreal persuasion, but he hadn’t applied himself in those directions. He was an enchanter and not in the Klatchian sense of a generic wizard. Wathen specialized in ‘fluences. Something that ‘fluenced him very much was money, and if some daft nob lady wanted a game put on imps, he could see that was done, not on the sweat of any talent of his own, but by making everyone else sweat until they bled.

Wathen strode in and looked at the motley bunch of student wizards at what could only loosely be described as work. In his day, there’d have been octograms on the floor, green smoke, and chanting.

One was trying to go over a set of dialogue with an imp, who kept flubbing its lines. He said, exasperated, “No, no, we’ve been over this, the line is, ‘Overseer's log, or should I say, direct communication. Because whoever is listening to this had the moxy to try to find out where I've gone.’”

“Guv, the only way a log is used in communication is one troll smacking another,” said the imp.

“You’re _certain_ imps aren’t sapient beings?” said one of the two Ephebians. He didn’t have a proper pointy hat on, very slovenly.

“Look, the Patrician’s very against slavery. He outlawed it all back when I was just a toddler. He’d have quashed imp-tech before it started if imps were sapient,” said a spotty-faced student. “He’s even tried to emancipate the Archchancellor’s hat.”

Wathen ahemed and introduced, “With your young Mister Stibbons busy being excited about how many theories he can overturn - and I don’t see why that’s anything to be excited about, wizards worked hard on those theories, and in my day, we were glad enough just to have a clue - I have been asked to provide some… supervision. I see that you are a knavish crew of foreigners -”

“I’m from Dolly Sisters! And you, if I’m getting my accents right, and I know I am, are from Llamedos,” said the spotty one, offended. Dolly Sisters always considered itself apart from Ankh-Morpork, unless it was more convenient to be a part of Ankh-Morpork, in which case it was more Ankh-Morporkian than the Shades.

“Ah. What we have here, I see, is a volunteer. You see, I understand that you’ve all been assigned a simple task - put some children’s game on an imp. It’s not hard. If it was hard, someone would be getting paid to do it. So the problem here is clearly foreign laziness and lack of uprightness of moral character. Now, I can’t do anything about your morals, but the sloth can be addressed,” said Wathen. He’d brought a sack with him, and from it, he withdrew a spinning wheel. “It’s well known that if a gel pricks her finger on her spinning wheel, she’ll fall asleep for 100 years. It’s less well known that if a spinning wheel pricks itself on you, you’ll stay awake, for the same time.”

There was a collective ‘er’ and backing away of the student wizards.

“Come now, Dolly Sisters, you just bite the spinning wheel and -” Wathen commanded.

“Oh. Bite. Right. Not that other thing… that I definitely wasn’t thinking,” said the spotty one, whose face was now a uniform shade of red.

“Don’t humans require sleep?” asked one of the Ephebians.

“That’s a weakness of moral fibre,” said Wathen, who’d woken up past nine. “Your name, Dolly Sisters?”

“Uh, Alf… Alfrick Nealy,” the student said hesitantly, and that was his mistake.

Names had power, but these children were _soft_. They’d forgotten Dead Men’s Boots or never lived through it at all. They’d forgotten when another wizard would sooner fireball you than look at you. Wathen _commanded_ , “Alfrick Nealy, bite the spinning wheel.”

* * *

No one noticed when a barbarian staggered into the Mended Drum and got into a fight. It was what barbarians did. If the attire was a bit strange, barbarians were always coming from exotic places. 

The odd drug dealer was swallowed whole by the Shades, and days and weeks out, the back alley unlicensed Alchemists would be brewing up some _different_ recreational substances.

But, as some more spare furniture vanished at Unseen University, Tektus appeared in the Rust Manor rose gardens, where the Rust gardeners had long maintained strange roses, which were all thorn and no petals, figuring they’d skip the metaphor middleman about every rose having its thorn and head straight towards home security instead.

Lady Rust just happened to be out for a garden stroll, parasol lofted overhead. She’d never encountered Tektus in the icono-game; he was from an expansion she’d never played and likely would have had very little interest in, save for perhaps the chance to destroy Acadia, nuke the Nucleus, and let the Fog consume Far Harbor. Lady Rust, however, had seen the concept art and in-game stills that the daft little wizarding student had hung up on the walls around their kennels. So she knew enough to know that Tektus, trapped in her roses, was not the normal sort of looney cultist that Ankh-Morpork brewed and was, in fact, an abnormal sort of looney cultist from out of that icono-game.

Lady Rust slid a stiff fencing saber out of her parasol shaft, moving the open parasol to her off hand, and she demanded, “What are you doing in my roses?”

Tektus looked like he’d never before had a thought in his head, and he hadn’t. Neither of them knew it, but he was a simple set of coded responses now mapped onto a living and breathing human being. If he hadn’t been mad before, he was mad now, and the source of his anger was… “...Sam Vimes! That wretched infidel Sam Vimes! He exiled me from my own flock, from Atom’s blessed island!”

Now Sam Vimes was an irritance, wasn’t he, that jumped up flatfoot with delusions of authority? Lady Rust smiled, sharp as her saber. “My name is Lady Regina Rust. Please introduce yourself, and do go on.”

* * *

If Constable Valentine had seen the shipping records that showed the sharp increase in the import of a heavy, cursed metal into Ankh-Morpork, he would have immediately told whatever Sergeant he thought most likely to understand, most likely Sergeant Littlebottom, but he wasn't reading those reports. He was rather contentedly assigned to Missing Persons, not that the Watch really had such formal divisions - Vimes was a huge proponent of cross-training, that any Watchmen should be able to walk any beat or slither or fly, as the case might be. If a dwarf had been reading those reports, he would have known at once that particular metal was a poison that made beards fall out, that kept children from coming, that ultimately rotted a body from the inside out. The metal was of the land of the dead, Pluto's domain, in the parlance of another world. A dwarf was not reading that report. A human was, unfortunately, and the human wasn’t even A. E. Pessimal.

* * *

As far as Sybil was concerned, one of the more positive outcomes of Sam’s little icono-game adventure was that her Sam had returned with actual friends. Friends who weren’t Watchmen! Even if one or two had joined the Watch since. Making friends didn’t come easily to her Sam. The gods only knew, he merely tolerated most of the others in their social circles, often just barely. But here were a group of people that Sam would willingly have over from time to time, for cards or just to talk. Certainly, their manners tended to be a bit rough, but they were all delightful people, and Sybil felt she was starting to look forward to their visits as much as her husband did.

That night they were again playing Cripple Mister Onion while young Sam, Shaun, and Nat played under Codsworth’s three watchful eyes in another room. Sybil knew that most of the group had never heard of the game before arriving in Ankh-Morpork, so she had been impressed with the speed with which most of them had picked it up. Miss Wright struggled the most, but she had a shrewd mind and reasonable bluffing skills, so she still presented a fair challenge. Mister Deacon, however, had to be watched the closest, if for no other reason than because that jolly little prankster would conveniently “forget” the rules in his favor if given a chance. 

Somewhat unusually, Sergeant Cheery Littlebottom had joined them for the evening. As Sam had explained it, Sergeant Littlebottom had been trying to sort out how to make new versions of some of the more interesting things Sam had brought back with him, including several of the drinks. Cheery wanted to test some of the mixes she had created and had been trying to figure out a good time to meet with the group, since they were in the best position to decide whether she had gotten the flavour right. Since they were meeting for cards, anyway, Sam had suggested she come along.

“The problem is, high sugar drinks tend to gunk up the internal tubes, and if these are like the old Nuka-Colas, they’re going to be real high sugar,” Mister Valentine was in the process of explaining to the dwarf as he tried to justify bowing out of the taste test. 

“Hey, no problemo, Nickerino!” Deacon cheerfully suggested, “We just find ourselves a bucket, and you can spit yours out!” 

Valentine looked mortified at the idea; he was the most consistently well-mannered of the group, although he reminded Sybil a bit of some of the forgeign dignitaries she occasionally dealt with: he behaved like someone clearly well brought up by the standards of their culture, but it was also clearly a slightly different culture than her own. Sybil supposed that if Mister Valentine had had an actual history rather than ‘backstory’, that would have been very near the truth. 

“I don’t think that should be necessary,” Sybil smiled as she took her first two face-down cards, then dealt three to each of the other players. “Although it was kind of you to make a suggestion so that Mister Valentine can participate, I think we have enough tasters here.” 

“Are you going to be trying to remake any of the snacks Blue brought back?” Miss Wright asked hopefully as Sybil took three more cards and then dealt two the rest, giving each in the group five facedown cards. 

Sergeant Littlebottom finished pouring the first round of sodas and rubbed the back of her neck, admitting, “I’m actually not that fond of cooking, to be honest. Besides, you guys probably wouldn’t like any baked products I made that I thought had a chance of lasting two hundred years.”

Miss Wright grinned as she peeked at her facedown cards, while Deacon snorted. “Uh, yeah, I remember the bread museum Carrot showed us.”

The dwarf giggled. “That sounds like Carrot.” 

“Actually, Miss Wright, my chef has worked out how to make a passable version of those ‘Fancy Lad Snack Cakes,’” Sybil explained. “Shaun is particularly fond of them.”

“I may have to hit you up for that recipe myself,” Deacon said, sniffing at his drink. “We usually had some of those around the safe houses. The synths were pretty wild for them.” Sam frowned and studied Deacon for a moment, causing Deacon to add, defensively, “Hey, just because synths like them doesn’t mean the rest of us _didn’t_ , they were popular pre-war for a reason!”

Mister Valentine returned two cards, which Sybil replaced, while the others tasted the new drink. They all looked a little startled. “Wait, it’s… bubbly,” Miss Wright observed.

Littlebottom gave the others a concerned look. “It’s supposed to be, isn’t it? The bottles listed most of the ingredients, even if it didn’t have the amounts, and the first one was always carbonated water, like lemonade.”

“Cheery’s right,” Valentine explained while Sybil continued to replace cards for the other players. The synth then gave the dwarf a sidelong glance. “Except for the lemonade part, that’s not supposed to be bubbly. But anyway, you guys are used to two century old stuff that’s gone flat and stale. When it’s new, it’s supposed to fizz.”

“Well, see, we do need Nick’s expertise on this!” Deacon exclaimed, grinning.

Sybil finished replacing everyone’s cards and took a moment to taste her own drink. “Oh! This is… very interesting,” she observed. The drink somewhat reminded her of root beer, but that bit was subtle compared with the other flavours, and there was a noticeable hint of vanilla. She considered. “I could see this as something that Sam might drink.” She looked at Sam. “Do you enjoy it, dear?”

Sam nodded as he put his glass down. “I had actually developed a bit of a taste for it in the Co- inside the icono-game, dear. The fizz is a bit of a surprise, but I think that actually improves the drink.”

“It’s not just that it’s not flat,” Deacon said thoughtfully as Sybil began dealing five cards face up to each player but herself – hers were face down. “It’s a little… brighter, I think?”

“Well, it would be fresher, sir,” Sergeant Littlebottom explained cautiously. “Also, the stuff Mister Vimes brought back made his arm-device click. I didn’t include anything that would do that.”

“What? No radiation? But that’s the best part!” Deacon laughed.

“I think Mister Vimes might frown on it if I began to manufacture troll drugs,” Littlebottom said solemnly.

“Ah, what a tyrant,” Deacon replied, watching the face-up cards carefully. 

“Yes, I am a cruel overlord who insists that my people don’t do anything they’d have to arrest themselves for,” Sam replied, deadpan, as he began to arrange the face-up and face-down cards in front of him.

Littlebottom began to pour the next round of soda tasters, explaining, “This is the cherry flavour.”

“So are you just making these for fun, or do you plan to do anything with them?” Miss Wright asked.

“Well, I’ve… never been much at business,” Littlebottom explained, “but I have a couple of cousins who think these might sell pretty well. They plan to handle the business and production side once I give them the final recipes, but they’ll be giving me some shares in the company.”

Miss Wright looked curious. She didn’t pull out a notebook and pen, but she gave the impression that she was doing so mentally. “So what name are you guys going to sell them under? I can’t imagine ‘Nuka-Cola’ would have much meaning here.”

The dwarf blushed beneath her beard. “Well, Perky thinks we should name it Cheery Cola. We… all agreed that using our last name probably wasn’t a good idea.”

“I don’t see why not!” Deacon exclaimed, as if shocked that they’d even consider otherwise. Then he tasted the drink and pointed to it. “Please tell me you guys are naming this Cheery Cherry.”

Cheery sighed, her cheeks growing even redder. “Yes. It’s going to be Cheery Cherry.”

“That’s incredible. The absolute best name possible,” Deacon replied, giving every appearance of sincerity. Valentine and Sam managed to keep their expressions neutral at this news, but poor Miss Wright had to hide her mouth behind a couple of cards that she suddenly seemed to be studying intently.

“The other Nuka names wouldn’t really work here, though,” Littlebottom continued, trying to get the conversation past Cheery Cherry. “If we name a drink ‘Quartz,’ everyone is going to think it’s meant for trolls, and ‘Quantum’ is just going to confuse everyone.”

“Oh, right,” Wright replied as something occurred to her. “Because I guess ‘quantum’ wouldn’t mean much here.”

“Oh, ‘quantum’ means something here,” Littlebottom corrected, seemingly a little surprised that Miss Wright would think otherwise. 

“Really? What’s that?” asked Wright.

“Usually it means, ‘something really strange that a wizard doesn’t feel like actually explaining,’” the dwarf explained.

Deacon snorted and muttered, “That sounds about right.”

“Do you have other names in mind?” Sybil asked, finally tasting her own Cheery Cherry. It was much like the first, except that it now had a strong cherry flavour added.

“My cousin does,” Littlebottom admitted, looking down at the table. “I… you need to understand, these names weren’t my idea, but my cousin thinks they’ll really sell.” The table whole table waited in suspense while the Sergeant took a deep breath and explained, “Quantum is going to be called ‘Cheery Punch’, and Quartz is going to be ‘Cheery Cream.’”

Sam’s expression went very carefully blank, while Mister Valentine just rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. Miss Wright gave up the struggle completely, put down her cards, and covered her face, and even Sybil was forced to take another small sip of her drink to help her contain her reaction. Deacon, however, just declared loudly, “Excellent! Those are great names!” and he finished the remainder of his Cheery Cherry. Sergeant Littlebottom sighed.

Valentine took the round with a five-card onion, and thus became the dealer, while the group moved on to the next drink. This one was a faintly purplish red. Cheery explained that, because they wouldn’t be using any radioactive elements in the drinks, they wouldn’t be able to get ‘Cheery Punch’ the same glowing blue that the group were used to seeing in Nuka Quantum. As it turned out, this was just the natural color that the pomegranate-based fruit-drink would have been. Valentine looked at the drinks and shook his head. “Y’know, if Old Longfellow were here… he’d be complaining that you weren’t trying Vim.”

Sam snorted. “No, he’d be complaining that it wasn’t alcohol,” he corrected.

Valentine shrugged and then admitted. “Probably.”

Littlebottom had already started to pass around the ‘Cheery Cream.’ This turned out to be a wonderfully creamy vanilla soda that caught Sybil by surprise. “Oh! This is very nice!” She could even see herself drinking that one from time to time.

“Perky is pretty sure that’ll be one of our best sellers,” the dwarf grinned, “although we’re trying to come up with a few other flavours. Like maybe one for trolls that we really can call ‘quartz’, or a toffee rat flavour for more traditional dwarfs.”

Miss Wright slammed her hand over her mouth, desperately attempting to stifle her giggles. From what Sybil could see, the newcomers took to things like dwarfen rat-based cuisine more readily than most humans did, claiming that it was better prepared than the mole-rat they had sometimes dealt with, but apparently, they still had their limits. 

“Not all the flavours are going to be for everyone,” Littlebottom allowed.

“Y’know, some of the Nuka flavours were alcoholic,” Miss Wright observed as she studied her glass of Cheery Cream. 

Sam grunted while Mister Valentine added dryly, “Sometimes without warning.” He nodded his head towards Sam. “Had to stop him from downing a Nuka-Orange, which contains a fair bit of pear brandy. Not to mention arsenic.”

Littlebottom’s eyes widened in alarm. “Arsenic? Wait, this was a drink for _humans_?!”

Sybil listened closely to the talk, looking between her Sam and Mister Valentine. Hadn’t Sergeant Littlebottom’s first case been that dreadful business with the arsenic candles? And here her Sam had gotten close to both poisoning and accidental alcohol. It was so nice that he had had Mister Valentine there to look out for him!

“That would be the rampant industry deregulation from before the war,” the synth grumbled.

Sam gave him a confused look. “You guys had regulations?”

“Well, if it helps, we’d be sure to label any alcoholic Colas right up front. Why leave off the biggest selling point?” The dwarf alchemist smiled faintly and added, “Although I think we’ll skip the arsenic flavour.”

* * *

Figuring out how to tactfully approach Captain Angua was difficult, considering the question he had in mind. If someone had asked him the same thing, he’d wonder if they were making fun of him, and the last thing he wanted was for Captain Angua to think he was making fun of her. He didn’t eat, but he did spend time in the mess hall, all the same, sometimes having a cup of comfortingly bad coffee because he certainly wasn’t going to bring any of his personal collection of liquor to work. So when Nick saw her across the mess, with a singularly boring salad - where did people keep finding those items? - he approached carefully.

Luckily, she actually spoke first, even though Nick could have sworn that, from the angle he’d come, she couldn’t have actually seen him. “Constable Valentine.”

“Yes, s- er… ma’am?” Nick replied.

Captain Angua didn’t give any particular indication of which appellation she personally found correct as she slowly turned around to look at Nick like someone looking at the inedible part of a fruit. She commented, “Carrot likes you. But he can like almost anyone.” The implication hung there that her standards were set somewhat higher.

A more interesting conjecture to be drawn about Captain Angua than her being a werewolf was that she had an understanding with Captain Carrot, and the thing was, when Nick had gone through the books with Brown and Metalmaul, he hadn’t actually found anything about fraternization, to which Brown had commented that women had joined the Watch relatively recently, so they probably hadn’t historically expected any fraternization, and that, by the time the Watch numbers contained a decent amount of women, it would have been too late to add any anti-fraternization statutes. Metalmaul had added that the historic Watch probably hadn’t expected any male/male fraternization, either, because, as Metalmaul said, “ _Humans._ ”

Captain Angua added, “Said you did a nice job interrogating Pigeons McGuire.”

Pigeons McGuire was a man commonly tangentially involved in crime, and as such, the Watch often appreciated his not-so-freely-given input on a number of matters, but McGuire was no Winters.

Captain Angua stood up, and she was, in fact, quite a bit taller than Nick. “Pigeons McGuire won’t talk to nonhumans. You’re not a golem, no matter what Mister Vimes calls you. What _are_ you, Constable Valentine?” Her eyes were golden, almost like Dogmeat’s.

And he found himself talking, and for all that Nick was talking, Captain Angua was the only one in the busy mess hall listening, “I’m a synth. A synthetic man. I was made from pieces and parts.” He nervously adjusted his wrist with a screwdriver. 

Captain Angua didn't blink. “And Pigeons squealed for you?”

“Not in as many words,” Nick admitted. "Really, these people's ability to just... not see things that don't fit their worldview is nothing short of amazing at times. Let's take my case as an example. A lot of people around here seem to, well, contextualize me as some sort of undead, usually a zombie. That's not too surprising, considering that I managed to convince people I was a really sick ghoul back home. It's not really correct, but in a city that more or less accepts having zombies as active members of society, I guess it works. Others, usually people who've found out that I was made artificially and that robots can be programmed in some way, assume I'm some sort of golem. This one works more on a metaphorical level than a real one, but I can at least understand the process that got them there. There are some people who don't know what I am and are willing to just accept that they don't know, but those are fewer than you'd expect.”

Captain Angua was apparently one of those people. 

“Then finally there are the people who can't comprehend what I am to the point that they just... somehow edit me out of their perceptions. Depending on how strongly they're holding onto the idea that I'm something that can't exist, I can be effectively invisible to them. Really comes in handy sometimes, but since there's no real way to guess whether a given person is going to fall in that last group or not, it's not something I can rely too heavily on. It gave me some trouble, too, when I first got here and was sent out to question people, gather reports, that sort of thing. The conversation would take a lot longer than it should have, just because I had to keep finding ways to remind people that I was right in front of them.”

“Eventually, though, I figured out that with the people who're just... determined not to see me, I can speak to them and they process it like... it was their own thoughts or something. So if I phrase it right, I can just ask questions and they'll answer without thinking, like they're talking to themselves and working things out in their own mind, only... out loud. It always feels a bit like cheating, but then, they're the ones who locked themselves into such a narrow world view, aren't they?”

McGuire had refused to speak with Artificial Flavours. Nick had to do it. 

Captain Angua narrowed those golden eyes and said quietly, “I thought you might be something like an Igor experiment. You smell of lightning.”

“That’s not far wrong, ma'am,” Nick admitted. 

She sat back down, drumming one hand on the mess table. “Now, what did you want?”

“Uh, just a recommendation on a decent armourer who can custom-fit a breastplate.”

* * *

Angua didn't tell Constable Valentine what else he smelled like: whiskey, cigarettes, which golems never smelled of, a peculiar artificial smell like sonkies, the blood-sharp scent of metal, and, still, like the navy blue of Commander Vimes. She'd gotten a good whiff of all of the strange people who had emerged from Hex’s game world, and none of the others had smelled like Commander Vimes the way that Valentine did. 

Valentine smelled like Commander Vimes like Lady Sybil smelled like Commander Vimes. The scent had faded now, but it wasn't gone yet. Vimes avoided Valentine, as far as Angua could tell, but when the two were in the same room, Vimes smelled rather as if he’d like to get scent all over Valentine again.

But he did nothing.

So Vimes had gone away, taken an Unalive as a lover, and left him.

Humans always discarded their monsters, eventually. They called it progress. They called it civilization.

* * *

It was late at night and Valentine was heading home towards Welcome Soap. Then he hesitated and changed direction, walking towards the University instead. He found his way through the wall with the loose bricks, the path he often took when he was visiting his brother, but headed for the Tower of Art instead. It undoubtedly had the best view in the city, and Nick had always appreciated a good view.

He opened the door at the bottom of the tower, a bit surprised it wasn't locked. He supposed the wizards didn't feel the need, given that non-wizards and non-students wandering the campus were rare. Valentine himself usually didn't linger on campus, finding the way the University's layout shifted on a day-to-day basis irritating at best. Buildings shouldn't just relocate themselves on a whim; there should be some sort of reason for it, even if that reason was, ‘A bomb went off nearby.’

As Valentine climbed the crumbling stairs, he briefly wondered why this place hadn't been condemned, but he supposed there were problems that he might be unaware of with demolishing a magical tower. Well, that, and building safety codes in Ankh-Morpork seemed to be applied maybe less consistently than in the Commonwealth. It seemed that whatever weird, accelerated Renaissance/Industrial Revolution that they were undergoing hadn't gotten around to that yet.

By the time he scaled the top of the tower, it was so late that it was early. There were no windows in the tower, but at the top, a set of doors let Nick onto a balcony. His arrival sent several birds fluttering for higher perches. They seemed to be some sort of raven or crow, but they had four wings and gave off a faint violet glow. These were most likely _magical_ mutations, not the other kind. For one thing, the location fit, and for another, Nick was pretty sure it would take a magic field to let a bird like that actually _fly_.

The synth looked out over the city and drew in a cooling breath. By God, but he had guessed right about the view. Overhead the Aurora Corealis colored the sky, while below him, clacks towers twinkled while words rode colored light on their trips around Ankh-Morpork. Nick paused to read a few messages, stopping and moving on with any that looked too personal. It looked like the Assassins’ Guild had a new code, so he took a moment to figure it out. 

The city didn't end at the walls. There was no constraining Ankh-Morpork. It sprawled out along the slow-moving river as it continued its languid trip towards the Circle Sea. 

The Aurora overhead began to fade, hinting at a coming dawn. Nick tilted his head as he tried to work out which direction it would be coming from that morning. On this world, there was no longer the reliable “rise in the East, set in the West” pattern; instead, as the flat world rotated on top of its four elephants, the sun could rise and set from any direction, depending mostly on time of year. He was pretty sure that today it was coming up more or less Rimward, which was fortunate, since that was the direction the balcony faced.

Nick had heard that the Disc's magic field had strange effects on light, but down in the city, he hadn't really been in a position to see that. Up here, he could see the golden-rose light spill in from the sea, moving like a thick liquid, like honey, as it spread over the landscape. There was no way light should move like that, and if it did, there was no way he should be able to see it, since it hadn't reached him yet, but it did move like that, and he could see it. It sped up as it flowed along the Ankh, spilling out along the flat lands to each side, and then spilled in among the outer buildings before it built up enough to pour over the walls and begin drowning the city in light. It reached the base of the tower first, flowing around and past it, then the level rose, climbing up to where Nick stood on the balcony. He lifted a hand and watched the light flow through his fingers for a moment, looking like syrup but feeling of nothing, and then it reached his optics, and he stood in daylight over Ankh-Morpork.

He looked out over the city that had broken Sam Vimes well before Nick ever got a chance to know him, then poured out its riches on him, then continually taunted him with just how much he had to lose. A vicious, capricious bitch, but Ankh-Morpork had a tighter grip on Sam than even Lady Sybil could hope to match. Nick Valentine was starting to get that. Not too long ago, his brother had told him, “Let go,” and who knew? Maybe someday he would figure out how to let go of Sam Vimes, though he couldn’t see how at the moment. But for Ankh-Morpork, there would be no letting go. There would be no running off to Fourecks, no guarding new clacks towers in the wilderness like Garvey had wandered off to do. Valentine didn’t have that choice. The city now had him in its grip, not the other way around, and he belonged to Ankh-Morpork now.

* * *

Vimes settled in for another interminable meeting of civic leaders, his notebook out. He could have taken notes on the Pip-Boy; Shaun had figured out that functionality, but typing on the Pip-Boy didn’t have the same effect on people as Sam Vimes writing in a notebook did. He could have been writing down his shopping list. It didn’t matter. Vimes writing in a notebook made people nervous.

The Alchemists’ Guild, led by Mr. Thomas Silverfish, was complaining about non-guild alchemists brewing up mind-altering substances. The Patrician had long ago made himself clear on that matter, though, which was that people could blow their own minds as long as the effect was only metaphorical and they didn’t blow anyone else’s.

Mr. Silverfish, though, continued to complain, “And they’re cooking up something called Psycho! It’ll make a human try to peel off a troll’s face.”

The tenor of Vimes’s note-taking changed slightly. Vetinari surely noticed. Vimes offered, before Vetinari could offer for him, “The Watch’ll be on the lookout for it.”

They bloody well would be. Psycho! In Vimes’s city!

The delegate from the Society of Apothecaries whined, “And the street chemisters are making this Med-X rubbish that takes the pain right away. Snake oil sales are down. The snake farms’ll be overcrowded, and before you know it, there’ll be a plague of snakes upon the city.”

But the man from the Chef’s Guild said, “Hold that thought, if you’ve got surplus snakes, we can cook ‘em up. The harpies and furies will eat them. Lovely snake pies, just like home.”

“Won’t that offend the medusas and gorgons?” said someone else.

The chef said equanimously, “I’ll sell ‘em snake pies, too.”

These meetings were all like that, an intricate dance of networking and bickering.

“You know what’ll really drive food sales? Weddings. We need more of them,” said Mr. Antimony Parker, Grand Master of the Guild of Merchants.

High Priest Hughnon Ridcully, of the Council of Churches, Temples, Sacred Groves and Big Ominous Rocks, said, “You can blame impiety for the lack of weddings.”

“No, we need more impiety, not less,” said Mr. Parker. “We ought to let the mollies marry. You look at any molly house, and they clearly do want to. Think about the tourism it’d bring in. Ankh-Morpork’d be the place to go for a molly with money, and money all spends the same.”

“Think about how many more cakes we’d sell,” said Mr. Rudolf Potts, of the Bakers’ Guild. “Now, they might be novelty shaped, but we could charge extra.”

“And suits and gowns,” said the chief of the Tailors’ Guild, which had nothing to do with the Seamstresses’ Guild.

Vimes had sort of been expecting that.

Hughnon clearly hadn’t been. He sputtered, “But that would be offensive to Blind Io and unto Offler and unto -”

“I could sell lightning-proof formal wear,” the chief Tailor said dreamily.

“It’s not like _any_ marriage is valid, anyway, so the whole thing needs a shake out,” continued Mr. Parker. He added defensively, “Look at the laws! It’s all illegal.”

“But it’s gross indecency -” started Miss Iodine Maccalariat of the League of Decency.

“The gross indecency charges can go toss, too,” said Mr. Parker.

“It would make many of our clients and guild members in good standing feel more… secure, if certain laws were… adjusted,” said Mrs. Palm.

“They’re talking about letting pooftahs _marry_ , that can’t benefit you -” someone else argued.

“We happily service married clients. We don’t discriminate,” Mrs. Palm said.

“I’d wring the neck of any… I mean, ahem, any molly that shows his face in public is going to be looking for a coffin, not a suit. That’s just how it is,” said another.

Vimes wrote in his notebook, making eye contact as he did. 

“They’re criminals, the deviant lot of them! The inverts ought to be hung up by their figgins!” cried someone else.

“As long as they pay for the figgins first, they can be hung up by the pasty of their choice, if they’re into that,” said Mr. Potts.

“The Watch has been very obliging to Ankh-Morpork’s traditional fashion of commerce in not enforcing those particular passages,” demurred Mrs. Palm. 

“There’ll be gangs roving about, looking for pooftahs to bash, and good, normal citizens will get hurt in the crossfire, you mark my words,” said another. “I shan’t have it.”

Vimes tapped his pen on the notebook and said, frowning, “I’d rather certain passages were gone entirely, because _that happens already_.” He thought about what Gneiss had said and what she wouldn’t say to a copper. “It’s difficult to get citizens to come forward as witnesses about who assaulted them or their acquaintances when they remember what the Watch has done to them in the not so distant past.”

“You can’t be serious, Commander. You’re a man’s man!”

A man’s man. That was a funny turn of phrase, now that Vimes considered it. He’d been Nick’s man, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t in this for himself or even for Valentine. Preston and Piper had challenged Vimes, and they weren’t wrong. “I’m always serious.”

* * *

The Patrician let the meeting run its course without many asides. It was best to let them shout it out. Then he stated that he would consider the matter in such a fashion that everyone was convinced that their opinion would win out.

He had been somewhat blindsided by the content of that meeting. It happened more often than he let on - being the Patrician was like juggling as someone stood behind him and threw progressively more unsuitable juggling targets into the mix - but it didn’t happen often. People told him things, often without him prompting them.

Had his sources thought it unimportant? Or had they thought he wouldn’t want to hear it?

In any case, some re-education would be required.

It didn’t take his sources long to track down at least some of what had happened, and Vetinari soon had a copy of a report that Mr. Parker had apparently read or at least a version of that report. Vetinari recognized the style, which raised further questions.

The report was clearly written by Pessimal, whom Vimes had poached from Vetinari. Vetinari still regretted that loss. Pessimal had a remarkable ability to assess a complex situation and come to clear-headed solutions, which were generally doomed to be rejected and ignored on account of the general populace’s bull-headedness. Pessimal wouldn’t have assessed this situation on his own, however, which meant Vimes had put him up to it.

Vimes had out-maneuvered Vetinari. He hadn’t been able to pull that off often, but he had done so in the past. Few people could. Clearly, Vetinari needed to send Vimes on more diplomatic missions, if Vimes was going to do something like that. Vetinari had been wanting to place a diplomat in Ephebe for some time...

Why had Vimes done it?

Vetinari could easily pinpoint the source of most of Vimes’s crusades. The man hadn’t spoken a word of dwarfish until Vetinari had tried to hobble the Watch with forced diversity hires, and Vimes had then gone on to help broker the Koom Valley Accords. He’d gone from not thinking about golems at all - hardly anyone did - to giving one a voice. He and his formidable wife had arranged for a goblin to play the harp, and the whole world had heard her plea.

So why this?

Vetinari couldn’t pinpoint the match that had set this particular fire, and it vexed him. Vimes had gone away, and he’d come back, and then… this. He had some new… friends. A particularly unlucky Dark Clerk had sat through a student wizard babbling about all of Vimes’s companions. Codsworth, a mechanical butler. Preston Garvey, the soldier who had left town. Dogmeat, who appeared to be actually a dog and not a werewolf. Piper Wright, the reporter, and her sister, Natalie Wright. Nick Valentine, a mechanical detective whom Vimes had hired, with whom Vimes had to be reasonably close, insofar as he was regularly invited to the Vimes residence, although all of Vimes’s new friends paid him call regularly, if they were in town. ‘Deacon’, who already had half a dozen aliases in the city, and Vetinari’s clerks confessed some difficulty keeping track of him. Longfellow, a hunter who had vanished. DiMA, who had stayed at the Unseen University. Strong, the super-mutant who had been shouted into shape by Detritus. And finally, of course, Shaun, the second son that Vimes and the Lady Sybil had made formal with a back-dated birth certificate that had taken Morecombe rather impressive legal gymnastics.

Vetinari had read the briefs and updates on all of them. Maybe one of them was bent. It usually took that sort of personal trigger for Vimes to launch a crusade. His Dark Clerk hadn’t got that particular information from one Chatur Bakshi, who had apparently droned on about statistics, optimization, and bizarre background theories. So Vetinari remained unsatisfied, insofar as he was unable to pinpoint the exact cause. It would have been productive to slide in that he knew why Vimes wanted what he wanted and then use that fulcrum to lever open the whole issue.

As it was, dozens of guilds had stated their support for rather sweeping re-calibration of how inverts were handled, including the Actors' Guild; the Bakers' Guild; the Chefs' Guild; the Guild of Confectioners; the Guild of Ecdysiasts, Nautchers, Cancanieres and Exponents of Exotic Dance; the Guild of Merchants; the Guild of Musicians; the Seamstresses’ Guild; the Guild of Shoemakers and Leatherworkers; and the Tailors' Guild, among others. A significant dwarf contingent had realized that dismantling of anti-same-sex relations laws would also be of benefit to them, personally, insofar as most dwarfs still prefered to present as a sort of generic masculine dwarf non-gender, which made many dwarf couples appear to be same-sex, whatever the reality was.

Against them were many voices.

There was already unrest.

If Vetinari weighed the voices, there were more against than there were for. But either way, the unrest would continue for a while, and then it would die down, and then Ankh-Morpork would find something else to be upset about. It was the way of the city. The loudness of the voices was ultimately meaningless. He was the One Man, with the One Vote.

But if something happened once, it became easier for it to happen again. If it didn’t happen now, it would come again. Maybe not in his time, but it would come again.

* * *

“You understand, there will be riots, either way,” said Vetinari.

“Sir.”

“There didn’t have to be riots now.”

“Sir.”

“One would ask why you felt it necessary for there to be riots now.”

“I don’t feel riots are necessary, sir,” Vimes said reproachfully.

Vetinari selected a thick report from a folder proffered by Drumknott. “This report was written by Inspector A. E. Pessimal.”

Vimes didn’t say anything.

“It ended up in the hands of Mr. Antimony Parker and several other Guild and other community leaders who would stand to gain from the report’s suggestions. They then brought up said suggestions. Now I must tender an answer. This is not the sort of report Inspector Pessimal would write on his own. Why did you put him up to it?”

“Because it came to my attention that there’s a group of Ankh-Morpork citizens who face a disproportionate share of violence who are hesitant to report anything to the Watch because in the back of their heads, they’re worried about being nailed on gross indecency charges or because they’ve had plaster work done or - or they remember when men were hung for buggery, and they know those laws aren’t off the books, even if we conveniently ignore them on behalf of the Seamstress’s Guild. Sir,” said Vimes.

“This won’t make it all better,” said Vetinari, looking at the report on his hand.

“I daresay nothing will, but that’s no reason not to make a start at it, sir,” said Vimes.

“I don’t like unrest.”

“We’ve already had unrest for years. We’ve just ignored it. You think gangs chasing down men they think are mollies are new? You think women being assaulted on suspicion of tribadism is new? You think any of this is new, sir?” said Vimes.

Vetinari studied Vimes. “It’s new that you care about it. Why?”

“I should have cared about it sooner. I suppose no one thought I’d do anything about it, which reflects on me, not on them, sir,” said Vimes, ever so slightly sharply. He certainly wasn’t going to name names, not with those laws on the books. He thought about dead Fritz McNab.

“My decision was already made, you understand. I was hoping for some enlightenment as to your motivation, but I see that you are insisting upon being opaque today.” They both knew what laws were still on the books. “Very well. I won’t detain you.”

* * *

> **MOLLIES TO**  
>  **MARRY,**  
>  **NEW RULES**
> 
> **From William de Worde**  
>  **Ankh-Morpork, December 1.**
> 
> Mollies will be granted new  
>  rights, including marriage,  
>  under sweeping legal  
>  reform. But who asked for  
>  this?
> 
> “Us,” Mr. Rudolf Potts (58).  
>  Pres. Baker’s Guild. “We  
>  did. We have cakes to  
>  sell and many options  
>  for shape.”
> 
> Gang violence expected.  
>  “Normal citizens will get hurt  
>  in the crossfire,” civic  
>  leaders concerned.
> 
> “That happens already,”  
>  Cmdr. Vimes (54).

* * *

There was always a battered, slightly gnawed copy of the newspaper at work, which was the Dimwell Street Watch House, today. Valentine didn’t know who bought it. Today, however, one of the dwarfs, Ringfounder, waved it in his face, which, given Valentine’s height, required quite a bit of jumping from the dwarf. “Look, _look_. Maybe folks’ll finally stop asking which dwarf’s the man and the woman when we’re both just dwarfs!”

Some dwarfs wanted to be known as women. Possibly, some dwarfs wanted to be known as _men_ , although if there were any, they sure weren’t loud. Most dwarfs, however, had been content to be known as dwarfs for millenia, and those dwarf-assigned dwarfs sure weren’t happy about _d'harak_ getting all up in their business.

Valentine’s head bounced up and down as he tried to look at the waving newspaper held by the jumping dwarf. He reached out and plucked up the newspaper for himself, and he spent what was, to him, a long moment reading, rereading, and triple-reading it before giving it back to Ringfounder. He said slowly, “Huh.”

One half of Constable Wong Ryan, who had been magically duplicated, shrugged and opined, “If you think about it, it’s actually less work for us. ‘S fewer laws and exceptions to remember, not more. Which I’m all for.”

“Now, I don’t want to be seeing any naughty prints of nad-” started Haddock.

“Aside from your own?” said Captain Sally, lightly. She was in a _good_ mood, although a Lance-Constable with a clacks flimsy called her away.

Everyone knew about the poster of the, er, lady, in Haddock’s locker. She was an education.

“No, I don’t want naughty prints of me, either,” said Haddock, frowning.

“It’s heresy!” Visit bemoaned.

“So are mixed weaves, and I don’t see you getting upset when chainmail’s half Muntab 3-in-1 and half Sto Plains 4-in-1,” Valentine said absently, handing Ringfounder back the newspaper.

Damn. Mama Valentine and the Institute between them hadn’t raised a stupid boy, and given the timing, Valentine knew of precisely one person in power who cared, who had, incidentally, made a promise to Preston Garvey and Piper Wright about this very matter oh, a month and a half ago. But how’d he gotten a bunch of the service Guilds on his side about it? That was clever. Grabbed them by the pocketbook, Valentine supposed. It was the only book that mattered, though Visit didn’t know it.

“That’s different,” Visit sniffed. “It’s a modern Time. Om is merciful.”

“And ‘thou shalt not fry thy fish with thy chips, for lo, this is an aberration unto -’” Valentine added, morbidly curious.

“That line has to be understood in the historical context of the difficulty obtaining fresh seafood and in Om’s desire to prevent His faithful from suffering from food poisoning, but it is the considered opinion of my sect that, with the advent of cooler cars on the railroad, that fish and chips may indeed be deemed acceptable,” said Visit, glaring.

“I don’t get it. This city is bursting at the seams with humans. It’s so overpopulated that a rat can’t scuttle across a floor without tripping over some human’s foot, and you’re all upset about _rllk_ ing that won’t make more humans?” said Artificial Flavours, who climbed up to Valentine’s shoulder.

“I’m not upset,” Valentine said, voice distant. Oh, maybe there was a little part of Valentine that was _furious_ , furious at Sam for leaving him and then doing… this. It was tauntingly unfair on a personal level, even if was the right thing for the public, but personal wasn’t the same thing as important. But Lady Sybil was a real warm-hearted gal, and Valentine couldn’t hold a candle to a dame like that. It wasn’t that he could blame Sam, not exactly...

Captain Sally looked a lot more serious after she’d read the clacks flimsy, and she raised her voice, commanding, “Cut the chit chat, you sons of mothers! A bar brawl at the Plumber’s Arms has spilled over into a street riot at Cock and Hand Road and Epigeous Street, and guess who, which lucky few, are going to be _privileged_ to serve the public and sort this out?”

Her smile was all fangs.

* * *

Piper and Nat knew, because they were there at the _Times_ when the story went to the presses. Piper had to half wonder if Blue had been involved somehow, making good on his promise. When Nat wasn’t at school, she was either selling newspapers or helping with printing press maintenance, and she rolled her eyes now. The little girl said cynically, “Sure, and maybe I’m a barbarian princess. It’s a gesture of goodwill from the Patrician to the Low Queen, obviously. Plus, it’s a political two in one, because there’s a big castrati contingent among the Temple of Seven-Handed Sek.”

“Hey, whatever reason it happened, it’s a good thing,” said Piper, wondering if she could grab Sally after work and maybe go check out the Chick and Artery, which she’d heard was a modern wine bar. It sounded promising, though the bar name might give vampires the wrong idea.

* * *

Willikins was _the_ butler, so he was the one who read to the Master in the morning. Codsworth did those things that Willikins did not feel like doing, which changed on a daily basis. But Codsworth would read the newspaper to himself, dutifully. It was only proper to be properly informed. Sometimes he’d read to the dragons in their pens. They didn’t pay attention.

This morning, he was gardening, the gardener being on one of his days off. Codsworth saw the Master proceeding out the front door, and he greeted, “Oh Master Sam! Will you be having gentlemen callers?”

The Master stared at Codsworth. Codsworth waited politely. The Master slowly looked around. There was no one here but them at this time of morning. Inwardly, Codsworth fretted. Had he misspoken?

Eventually, the Master said, “Bloody hells, _no_ , Codsworth. I’m… married,” and he headed off.

That was a shame. Codsworth rather liked Mr. Valentine.

* * *

Deacon reclined in the Cut Purse, at the corner of Broadway and the Street of Alchemists. It was the Thieves’ Guild bar in the way that the Bucket was the Watchmen’s bar. As such, the Cut Purse was a _very_ safe bar, if one was either a licensed thief or had already purchased a Thieves’ Guild subscription package. Deacon had a Thieves’ Guild badge and license, and the picture even looked like him (at the moment), but if Whispers or ol’ Nicky ever asked him, Deacon would say he nicked it.

‘Lightfingers’ and ‘Penny the Pincher’ were arguing about the etiquette for wedding-crashing and pickpocketing at a molly wedding. Lightfingers said it was acceptable, as long as you brought along a bubbly white wine, but Penny was insisting it had to be a red.

Ankh-Morpork was a hell of a trip, Deacon thought, sipping his beer, but the city had made Whispers, and once that fact had slotted into place, so many things about Whispers had started to make sense.

Started.

Deacon still couldn’t explain why the guy could see in the dark and deadlift three times his own body weight. He didn’t _seem_ like a vampire...

* * *

“Oh good, the great Ankh-Morpork is finally getting with the times and doing something Ephebe has done for millenia,” said Zinon, theatrically.

The High Energy Magic Building tended to pirate the newspaper, mainly because Hex, which was on the clacks system, could more or less pirate _anything_ on the clacks system. It wasn’t particularly interesting piracy. No scimitars or cutlasses were involved, and absolutely no one walked any planks, not even Planck lengths. Not so long ago, the worst thing that could happen was that Mister Stibbons might sigh at them in a long-suffering fashion.

Now, the worst thing had already happened, and his name was Kai Wathen, and him happening was entirely unrelated to Hex-mediated clacks piracy.

“Only your generals. People who can get away with it,” Xian argued.

“Well, of course! Common men can just settle for women,” said Zinon.

“Aren’t you a fisherman’s son?” reminded Xian.

“ _I’m a wizard!_ ” Zinon snapped.

“Anyway, this would let any group of _n_ ≥ 2 consenting adults, as defined by the conventions of their respective species, marry,” said Xian, sounding wistful.

“Yeah… but we’re celibate,” Zinon sighed.

“Yeah,” sighed Xian.

DiMA looked at his printout of Faraday.

* * *

In Hergen, in the shadow of a clacks tower, Preston Garvey read the news, and he smiled. There was another clacks guard he’d been trying to work up the courage to ask on a date sometime. His eyes swept the horizon out of long-practised habit. At the top of the next clacks tower down the line, something very, very large and impossibly sinuous uncoiled around the clacks tower. Garvey sighed. Not again.

* * *

In the morning, after Vimes left for work and the boys left for school, Sybil read the newspaper and thought about the cover story. She thought about the side stories, as well. A gang had tried to grab a man for wearing a dress; they’d been introduced to Mr. Fireball by the rather irate wizard, who’d been rendered hatless but not magicless by an unfortunate gust of wind. But there were other gangs, and most people in dresses weren’t hatless wizards.

No, the law changes weren’t a fix for everything, but they did highlight underlying problems that deserved to have the light shone upon them.

Sybil oversaw the running of the mansion and tended to her dragons. In the afternoon, she took tea with a friend, who went on about how disgusting it was that Vetinari was humouring the perverts. Sybil thought about her Sam.

“And which perverts would those be?” Sybil asked faintly.

Loretta Durchville sniffed, “The godless degenerates that Vetinari’s giving special privileges to. I knew that man gets out the wrong side of the bed.”

Sybil toyed with her teacup. “I don’t see that Havelock’s given special privileges to anyone.”

“He’s letting the debauchees marry! It’s a mockery!” Loretta shrilled.

“If they marry, it’s hardly debauchery anymore, is it?” said Sybil.

“They ought to be hung, the lot of them. That’s what Winder would have done,” Loretta continued.

“Winder had your great uncle executed, didn’t he?” said Sybil, thinking. It hadn’t been over sex or anything like that. It was just politics, if Sybil remembered correctly.

“Everyone has a great uncle who was executed by someone,” Loretta dismissed. “It doesn’t do to encourage the miscreants. And your own husband, clapping in iron the upstanding young men trying to put down this menace -”

“Lori,” Sybil said quietly but firmly, “the only menace is people thinking like you do, that gangs looking for an excuse to beat people up for being different are upstanding citizens.”

Loretta huffed, “Really? You’re excusing fornication? What if your husband went off bent? You’d be marching in the street, demanding a stoning, mark my words.”

Sybil spilled her tea, the saucer catching most of it. 

Her husband _had_ gone off bent. And he’d come back, and he’d apologized for it, and that was it.

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“You’d let your Sam bring home a molly?” Loretta sneered.

Vimes hadn’t tried, but Sybil had invited Valentine to dinner, and Valentine was polite and respectful and funny and cultured and he had been her Shaun’s adoptive father and he was still a cordial friend to her Sam, so she kept inviting him over. Shaun missed Valentine, and Vimes could do with some friends. But if Vimes _had_ tried to bring Valentine home...

If she hadn’t known Valentine, the answer would have been ‘no’, and there would have been some quiet, sad words. Sybil knew Valentine now, though. She liked him, and that wasn’t just her liking almost anyone. For one thing, she didn’t like Lori very much right now. If twelve or so years ago, it had been a Captain Valentine that had come knocking, looking for an expert on dragons… well, Sybil didn’t know if she could get past the grey skin and the exposed machinery.

But she might have.

“We’d discuss it as adults.”

Only, they hadn’t.

“I never!” said Loretta, scandalized.

“Why not?” asked Sybil, frowning.

“It’d lead the children into deviancy! It’ll lead to the total breakdown of marriage! The gods will strike us down!” Loretta shrilled.

“I don’t think you’ve much paid attention to how the gods conduct themselves,” Sybil said mildly. “If you read at all in Classics about Hoki’s relations…”

Loretta shifted uncomfortably. “Ah. Well. The gods. But men will leave their wives -”

“They already do,” said Sybil. Divorce and assassination were both options exercised by some.

“Children will be led into sin,” Loretta warned.

“They can find it themselves, I’m sure,” said Sybil, thinking about Ankh-Morpork.

Loretta shook her head sadly. “Dis-organizers and now this. You’re a fool for new-fangled nonsense, Sybil.”

“No. I don’t think I am,” said Sybil.

“Next Wednesday?” Loretta asked, pulling out her calendar.

“I’m busy then,” said Sybil, without checking her own calendar. She was busy every other time Loretta asked.

Sybil returned to her dragons. Young Sam and Shaun came home from school, and she sat with them and listened to their days. Young Sam’s day hadn’t been much different from any other; Miss Sto Helit always maintained order in her classroom.

Shaun, though, had gotten in a fight at lunch. Someone had called another boy a molly, the other boys had ganged up, and Shaun had tried to pull them off him.

Young Sam went off to his room to work on his homework, but Shaun stayed with Sybil, and he asked, “Can I have today’s newspaper?”

He read it. He was a quick reader. Then Shaun looked pensive, and he asked, “Will I get my Dad back? Now that it’s safe?”

Sybil inhaled sharply. “I don’t know about that.”

Vimes returned home in time for dinner, several notches above his usual baseline level of simmering anger, but he softened for her and the boys, and they made it through dinner, and he spent time with the boys, as he’d been careful about lately, mindful of Shaun’s abandonment issues.

Then Shaun asked if he could talk with just his mother and father, and he asked Vimes hopefully, “So do I get my dad back now?”

Vimes froze.

“You said it wouldn’t be safe for him, to talk about it,” Shaun reminded, “but it’s not gross indecency anymore. And you could marry him! And then we could all live together again.”

“It’s still not that safe,” said Vimes hesitantly, and Sybil thought about how and likely _why_ he’d come home fuming, “and I. I couldn’t. I. Uhm. I love your mother, and I wouldn’t knowingly be disloyal to her.”

“Why does being loyal to Mother mean you have to betray Dad?” asked Shaun, his hope dashed.

Vimes locked up again. Sybil sighed and put her hand on his shoulder. Reading that newspaper article in the morning and then talking with Loretta, Sybil had wondered if Vimes might ask her if he could court Valentine again. 

Eventually, Vimes excused, “Nick wouldn’t have anything to do with a married man, anyway.”

Sybil gave her Sam a bit of a sidelong look, but he seemed sincere in his assertion. Her Sam could be so dense, sometimes. She thought Valentine would very much court a married man, if the married man was willing.

“Nick’s a good man,” Vimes added, somewhat defensively. “Well. Golem. Synth. Person.”

Shaun sagged. “Oh.”

Sybil wondered if she ought to point out to Vimes that while Valentine might be the good person that Vimes asserted he was, she really didn’t think Vimes was correct in assuming Valentine wouldn’t court him. Did she really want her Sam bringing Valentine home, though?

She wasn’t sure.

So Sybil didn’t say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: Same sex marriage is not a fix-all. However, same sex marriage does seem to be economically beneficial, and if Ankh-Morpork cares about anything, it’s money. 
> 
> <https://www.fastcompany.com/3045918/what-marriage-equality-would-mean-for-the-economy?itm_source=parsely-api>
> 
> <https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/economy/same-sex-weddings-3-billion-trnd/index.html>
> 
> As a queer person myself, it’s a fantasy for me for a powerful person with connections (in this case, Sam Vimes) to leverage said power and connections to actually make the world a little bit better for other queer people by leveraging the baking industry. Happily, this is a fantasy story.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	8. Holy Words and Receipts * He Was Just Here! You Saw Him, Right? * The Shadow on your Wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [I Have Not Been to Oxford Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDh9QgzFBN4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=13) by David Bowie. 
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Holy Words and Receipts * He Was Just Here! You Saw Him, Right? * The Shadow on your Wall_

Nick was running late to dinner and hadn’t even had time to change from his uniform to his better outfit, and that was why he’d let an exceedingly obvious pit trap get him, he swore. At the very least, he was swearing.

“You need assistance out of there? I mean, I’m fine with watching you flail,” said Sam, looking down at Nick with amusement.

“Yes, actually,” and Nick had to catch himself from saying ‘jackass’. He could call his friend Sam a jackass. He couldn’t call Commander Vimes a jackass, though, and he didn’t want to push his friend Sam into being Commander Vimes at him.

Sam helped him out and took a look at Nick, observing, “Had the breastplate altered, huh? Looks good. Looks like it fits you better, and ah, I see, you’ve added some padding there…” He peered at Nick, walking around him thoughtfully. “Extra set of strapping there to unload some of the weight… You need help out of it?”

“Sure,” said Nick, which was a bad idea, and he knew it, but he didn’t mind at all when Sam reached around him to deftly undo the various buckles that kept on his breastplate.

When Sam was almost done with the last buckle, Nick heard the sound of repulsors, and Codsworth floated into the hallway, greeting cheerily, “Ah, Master Vimes and Constable Valentine! Dinner is ready, you know.”

Sam turned an interesting shade of red, and Nick felt guilty as hell, thanking God that Codsworth wouldn’t discuss what hadn’t quite happened yet there. There was no stiffer upper lip than a non-existent metal one. He took the now-removed breastplate from Sam and followed him and Codsworth to dinner, where he gave Shaun an interesting set of screws that he’d collected and Sam a little book on the wonders of ear wax.

* * *

Constable Valentine and Lance-Constable Artificial Flavours found the Alchemist Otis Brook. They found him dead on the floor of his apartment, which meant he was no longer a missing person but a homicide. This was unusual, because alchemists didn’t usually die all in one piece. Valentine took down careful notes and studied the scene, as he waited for Corporal Reg Shoe to arrive to take it from there.

Brook had, somewhat disappointingly, not been sacrificed to any fell god or anything like that. From the vomit on the floor and the bruising on his head, he’d clearly been nauseous and dizzy, and he’d fell, maybe slipping on the vomit, and hit his head. That alone didn’t make it a homicide, as Flavours helpfully pointed out. A stomach flu could have done it.

But Valentine knew the red rash on the skin, the blistering and peeling, and he wrote, carefully, in his notebook: acute radiation poisoning. Then Shoe arrived, and Valentine closed up the notebook and gave his report. Littlebottom would have the final say, with the forensics, if Valentine was right. He hoped he wasn’t.

They didn’t have another case assigned yet, though, and Valentine was supposed to be teaching Artificial Flavours something useful, not depressing him with conspiracy theories about polonium tea. So while they were waiting for their next assignment, Valentine took Artificial Flavours up on the roof of the Watch House to watch the clacks towers. Valentine had found it _real_ easy to learn how to interpret the clacks, just like how Sam had found it astoundingly difficult to hack computers in the Commonwealth. (So many times, Valentine had wanted to just gently lift Sam’s hands off the keyboard as he struggled with novice encryptions and set the other man aside for a moment.)

Somewhere out there, Preston Garvey was guarding a new clacks tower in the wilderness and the settlement that had sprung up around it, as settlements did. He wrote frequently. Valentine was glad Garvey was doing well.

“So the Watch uses encryptions that are, in theory, easy to read but relatively secure,” said Valentine, dubiously. He didn’t find _any_ of the encryptions that _anyone_ used to be secure. The closest anyone came to foxing him was Hex, but so far, Valentine had been able to crack even those ciphers, even when the clacks had moved from binary up to 16-bit colours. He was already anticipating when they’d move to 32-bit colours. There was an interesting theological debate to be had about whether God could make a stone so heavy that He could not lift it, but Hex had, in Nick Valentine, produced a code-cracker better than himself. Hex had more raw processing power, but Valentine was _motivated_.

It had dawned upon Valentine that he could have probably found a rather indispensable and well-paid government position as one of the Patrician’s clerks, just reading clacks messages that others found undecipherable, but Valentine didn’t want to be one of the Patrician’s clerks, especially considering that Sam Vimes would probably box his synth flesh ears if he did become one of the Patrician’s clerks. He was happy in the Watch. So he had rather deliberately not mentioned to anyone his capacity for decryption.

Valentine didn’t expect Artificial Flavours to be able to do that sort of decryption at all; his goal was just to get the rat able to read Watch clacks, so he’d be able to do the same at home in Bad Blintz.

“What’s that message?” asked the rat, waving a paw at a blur of colour. He had on a tiny, rat sized pair of glasses to compensate for his natural ratty near-sightedness. He didn’t often wear them, since his other senses compensated for the poor vision during normal work and while he enjoyed reading, he did so while sitting right on top of whatever he was reading, but they were necessary to be able to see the clacks.

“Not a Watch message,” Valentine replied. “Y’see, Watch messages have _these_ signal sequence headers,” and he noted them down in his notebook for Flavours to read. “So you want to watch for those.”

“If it’s not a Watch message, do you know what it was?” said Artificial Flavours.

As it was, Valentine did. “A shipping request...” He didn’t draw it out in his notebook. He never drew. He rendered it. Valentine didn’t like what he saw: a shipment request for several tonnes of pitchblende.

* * *

The next day, Constable Nick Valentine and Lance-Constable Artificial Flavours looked up at the Golem Trust, Flavours tasting the air carefully with his nose as he looked. The windows were boarded over. In fact, one had been broken through and then boarded over a second time. Graffiti covered the store front, proclaiming those inside to be blasphemers, that things can’t be people, and issuing threats against those who enter. Valentine scowled at one bit in particular, which read, “sMash the brasterds”. The storefront looked like regular attempts were made to clean up the graffiti, but apparently more was just added. A building in this state wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of post-War Boston. A plaque next to the door, one that someone had managed to chip a corner off in a failed attempt to remove it entirely, contained strange, thin writing belonging to some language Valentine wasn’t familiar with.

Flavours let out a low whistle. “Looks like a popular place,” he observed.

“Yeah, and in a real welcoming neighborhood,” Nick replied sourly. 

He pushed the door open and found himself peering at four back-lit figures. The center one, feminine, pointed a crossbow at him and snapped, “Hands where I can see them.”

But then the one to her left raised a hand to try and calm her. “Woah, woah, woah, hang on! This is the Watchman they sent to help us find Dilibrat, right, Nick?” Nick knew that voice, just like he recognized the sunglasses that glinted in the gloom. Deacon.

“That’s right, Deacon. And there’s two of us.” Valentine gestured to his left shoulder. “Meet Lance-Constable Artificial Flavours, a temporary transfer from Bad Blintz.” 

“Bad Blintz?” said one of the remaining figures. In the dim light coming from behind the group, it was hard to make out his face, but at least the dim light made the face easier to look at: just as Deacon’s sunglasses glinted, this man’s entire _suit_ glinted, throwing off golden reflections from the light behind him. Valentine instantly recognized the outfit worn by Ankh-Morpork’s Postmaster General because really, how could anyone mistake that suit for anything else? “Nice place, I’ve been through there a few times.” He studied the rat. “You’re one of the ones who used to do the old Pied Piper bit, weren’t you?”

Flavours seemed to scrunch up into himself. “Ah, yes,” he admitted, embarrassed. “We did that, back before the Arrangement in Bad Blintz. It’s just… kind of hard for a rat to walk in and ask for a job most places, y’know? We were just looking to make enough to find some place where we didn’t _have_ to live by theft, raiding people’s garbage and larders and granaries and whatever. None of us were happy with the situation. That’s why when the Arrangement gave us an out, we jumped at it.”

Nick glanced at the rat on his shoulder. So his new partner was a reformed con-artist? Although the synth supposed he could understand the difficulty in finding gainful employment when one was a talking rodent. 

The Postmaster General, Moist von Lipwig, waved a hand and said, “Oh, no, I’m not casting judgement. So long as you’re on our side now, I’m glad to hear it. But dear,” he turned his attention back to Adora, who had put away her crossbow and was in the process of lighting a cigarette, “why don’t we turn on the lights for our guests.”

“Please Excuse The Caution,” said the fourth and final figure in the slightly echoing tones of a golem, not that Nick could have missed that silhouette. He began to relight the lantern on the main service desk. “There Have Been An Increase In Attacks Of Late. It Ebbs And Flows. I Am Klug, The Duty Receptionist. This Is Adora Von Lipwig, One Of Our Managers. You Appear To Already Know Deacon.”

Deacon beamed. “Oh, yeah, Nick and I go _way_ back.” He glanced over at the detective. “Feeling a bit of deja vu here, Valentine?” 

What? Just because Deacon was apparently vouching on behalf of Nick and his partner to an angry, chain-smoking superior who was part of an organization dedicated to freeing artificially-created people and who faced considerable opposition from the public for doing so? Why ever would that feel familiar?

“Not really,” replied Nick.

After all, the last time it happened, the partner in question had been Sam Vimes. Not to mention the fact that unlike the Railroad, these people acknowledged that Nick was there.

He looked around. The room had the look of a place that underwent frequent damage and abuse, but it was also maintained as meticulously as a place could be in such circumstances. Nearly every piece of furniture in the place showed signs of repair, and there was fresh paint with patches of slightly fresher paint all over the walls. “You say you get a lot of attacks?” he asked, concerned. 

“Our mission’s never been very popular, Constable Valentine,” Adora explained coolly, eyes narrowed as she watched Valentine over her cigarette. “To many religions, what we’re doing is considered blasphemy, and even for the… less religious, there’s a lot of fear directed towards the golems. Mostly irrational, but humans are very good at irrational.” During her pauses, she sucked on her cigarette as if she had a grudge against it.

“And here I was worried I’d have to take some sort of boring desk job if I wanted to help out,” Deacon observed jovilly as he slouched back in his chair. “Looks like I lucked out on that count! Although I do technically have a desk.” Deacon frowned. “And business cards. It’s weird.”

“But haven’t you reported the attacks to the Watch? I’m here to help you find the postal golem that went missing, but I could pass on that you guys are having problems with unruly locals,” Nick pointed out, pulling out his notebook. 

“There Is No Need, Constable Valentine,” answered Klug. “They Are Already Aware. In Fact, The Watch Have Been Very Responsive In Their Investigations And Have Apprehended Several Of The Perpetrators.”

“The problem is, there’s always more,” Adora explained sourly, tone dripping with disgust.

Artificial Flavours leaned forward. “But, uhm, maybe someone could come out to keep an eye on things?”

“Your Commander’s already offered,” Adora answered. “The golems would prefer to take care of the Trust themselves as much as possible.” She looked over at Klug and for the first time her expression softened. “They’re very stubborn about that sort of thing.”

“Well in that case,” Nick began, “can you give me a description of Dilibrat?”

“Better, we have an iconograph,” Moist answered, removing a folder from his coat pocket. “We also have the details of his route and the terms of his contract. He really only had a month or two left of service. Maybe he was targeted because he was about to become a Freed?”

“Could be, could be,” murmured the synth as he flipped through the paperwork. Flavours had crawled partway down his shirt so he could get a closer look. “Really too early to be sure of anything.” He tried to think of how to word the next question. ‘Does he have any enemies’ wouldn’t help. Nick _had_ seen the graffiti on the store front. “I don’t suppose there have been any… specific threats? I mean, against him, rather than Trust golems in general.”

Moist shook his head. “Not really, no. The people who don’t like them don’t usually care enough to learn to tell them apart.”

Valentine snorted. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

Flavours looked up. “Do you mind if we come by the post office later to talk to his shift manager?”

Moist gave a winning grin. “Of course! Whatever you need from us to crack this case, we’ll be glad to help! You’ll probably want to speak with Tolliver Groat, the Deputy Postmaster General, while you’re at it. He’s really more involved with the day to day business of the Post Office, since my other duties often have me out of town. It was quite a shock to have returned and learned one of our golems has gone missing.”

“Thanks,” Nick answered, noticing how Moist had slipped in his own alibi. Then he looked over the route once more. “I think we’ll start with walking his route. Maybe someone along the way has seen something…”

Adora blew out a stream of smoke and scowled. “I’d also keep an eye on any rubbish or trash heap along the way for broken pottery.”

The synth’s expression grew more sober, then he nodded. “If we’re able to find his… pieces, are you able to do anything?” He knew that the Freed golems in the Watch could sometimes be reformed and re-fired after even extensive shattering, but he’d heard contradicting things about the ones who hadn’t received their receipts.

“That depends,” Adora admitted. “If he has been broken, it would go a lot better if you can find his chem. We keep a copy on file, but without the original, there’s no way we can be sure he’d have a… well, continuous memory. You could just get a new golem built off the same base chem, but sometimes the clay remembers.”

Nick scowled and nodded, standing up. “All right, I’ll keep that in mind.” He inclined his head to the four. “Well, thank you for your time. I’ll see what I can dig up.”

Deacon pushed away from the counter he was leaning against, grabbed his jacket from the back of a nearby chair, and announced loudly, “Klug, I’ll see him out. I’ve got a few things I need to check on, anyway.”

The golem inclined his head in a nod. “Thank You, Mister Deacon, And I Hope It Goes Well.”

Deacon gave a slightly amused smirk at being called ‘Mister Deacon’, then moved to the door, holding it open for Valentine and Flavours.

* * *

Deacon held his sociable smile until the door shut and then dropped it like it was molten metal. “Couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he muttered to Valentine.

“Obviously, if you’re this willing to just charge into the open,” Valentine observed wryly.

Deacon smirked. “Not like we don’t have cover.” He casually waved towards the roof of the opposite building. “The Trust might have turned down the Watch’s offer of a guard, but I’ve noticed an awful lot of gargoyles in the area lately…”

Nick’s gaze followed Deacon’s gesture. “Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s Constable Pediment…” he observed.

Flavours shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it. Vision’s not exactly my strong suit.”

“So, I take it you don’t exactly get along with your new bosses,” Valentine observed as he and Deacon began walking.

Deacon scowled. “Those _aren’t_ my bosses. Well, I guess technically Klug is, but me and Adora both work _for_ the golems, and she’s so busy with the Clacks these days that she’s hardly in the Trust. She’s not so bad, though. Sure, she’s angry, mean, and she smokes like a chimney, but it’s nothing I’m not used to.”

“So it’s the hubby you don’t care for?” Valentine prodded.

Deacon snorted. “Let’s just say that we’re both keenly capable of recognizing a fellow purveyor of brahmin dung when we meet one,” he answered dryly. “That, and I think he’s annoyed that I occasionally work closely with his wife, which is _absurd._ She’s practically young enough to be my granddaughter.”

“He was… very helpful,” Artificial Flavours observed in a careful tone that suggested he had already developed a copper’s sense that a person being overly helpful was cause for suspicion. Of course, a person being overly unhelpful was also cause for suspicion, so it all balanced out. “But I don’t really think he had anything to do with Dilibrat’s disappearance, even if he did make sure to point out that he was out of town.”

“Yeah,” agreed Deacon. “Hah! Railroad business,” he added, amused.

“He seems to have an awful lot of major positions,” Valentine said thoughtfully.

“He does. Probably to keep him from going out and getting more jobs on his own,” Deacon observed cynically.

“At least he came up with the paper money idea,” the rodent added with a shrug.

Valentine glanced at the rat on his shoulder. “You like the paper money?”

“Well, sure,” Flavours answered. “I never did understand the human obsession with round bits of metal. At least you can _eat_ the paper!” Nick stopped walking, and both he and Deacon looked at Artificial Flavours. The rat clarified, “Well, _I_ can eat the paper.”

“You don’t… eat your pay, do you?” Valentine asked cautiously.

“Naw. I’m just saying that it has more uses than the metal, but I understand ‘buying stuff’, like books.”

Deacon, a bit morbidly fascinated, asked, “Which you eat?”

“Well, sometimes, eventually, or use them for nesting,” Artificial Flavours admitted, “but I always read them first. I am, after all, an _educated_ rodent. And anyway, reading them’s more than I can say for a lot of the humans out there! You know before the newspapers made reading popular what the main thing was that people used the almanacs for?”

Deacon laughed, “I can guess!” while Nick just heaved a sigh. 

* * *

Sister Charm, whose real name was Berry Rule, had wanted to join the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee, which met down on Treacle Street. Her cousin was in them, and he said they were a good time, did cookouts of the unbeliever at least once a month. But they were _Brethren_ , not _Sistren_. Most of the really good cults were boys’ clubs, where they could go to complain about the girls they weren’t getting, instead of going out and getting those girls. Charm told her cousin that most women really would fancy a lad who could sew his own robes, do a bit of decorating, even if it was pentacles, and could cook a little, even if it was just the infidel over the coals of retribution, but her cousin insisted that nah, women were incomprehensible beings, and love potions were the only way to go.

But the Cult of Atom! Now there was a cult. They took men, women, and whatever else. They were new, of course, very small, but Sister Charm was happy to be getting in on the ground floor. It was something to do, a social activity. Mostly, they gave praise to some odd glowing rocks and listened to a looney rant. Some of the brethren and sistren were even going all in with rather spiffy tattoos. It was grand fun.

Oh, so they’d done something rather horrible to a golem, and maybe they’d killed an old alchemist, Otis Brook, by poisoning his tea, but that was simple high spirits. They’d asked him to refine uselessium and take it a step farther, to… enrich it. He’d gotten skittish, saying that what they were doing could be dangerous. He’d threatened to talk to someone about it. So they’d made him a nice cup of tea and told him to calm down...

Every cult engaged in a little chicanery of that sort. It made the city interesting. It wasn’t like they’d done anything really bad, like summoned a dragon to burn down the city.

Sister Charm hoped the other cultists would like the sweetrolls she’d made.

* * *

"So you used to be a confidence rat, huh?" Nick asked the diminutive partner who was perched in his usual spot as they strolled towards the post office, intent on tracing Dilibrat's route from start to finish. He and Deacon had parted ways once they’d hit Pending Pools.

"Yes, _ugh_ ," the rat exclaimed, flopping onto his side and letting his front legs dangle limply down the front of Nick's shoulder. "None of us were happy about it, just so you know. Well, except for Maurice, who was the one who came up with it. He was a cat, y'know. But anyway, yeah, we did it, but that was only because we were hoping to earn enough to just... buy some island somewhere where we could set ourselves up real nice and just live by ourselves and not have to steal or chew holes in anyone's baseboards and we could just... be ourselves, you know? At least, that was always Dangerous Beans's dream, but it mostly sounded good to the rest of us, too, since back in those days, we couldn't imagine any place where we could live among humans openly like we do now."

Nick studied Artificial Flavours out of the corner of his eye. "You... wanted to create a secluded little island refuge where you got to live openly in your own community, huh?" He smirked. For a moment he couldn't help but wonder what it would be like if DiMA ever met this 'Dangerous Beans'. "But you say you were traveling with a _cat_? A talking cat, I assume?"

Flavours chuckled. "Yeah, Maurice. We're, uhm, pretty sure he caught the talking from eating old Additives, unfortunately, but we... well, most of us try not to hold that against him. He had just been a dumb cat at the time, and didn't know any better. I can tell you, once he did know better, he got _real_ careful about _what_ he ate, and made sure he wasn't eating a _who_ by mistake. Wouldn't touch rats at all, and with any bird or other kind of rodent, he'd make sure to ask them five, six, sometimes even more than that if they could talk or had a name or such. Didn't even play with them, put them right out of their misery as quick as he could, which I can tell you, is downright un-cat-like. You could even tell the play instincts were still there, because he'd sometimes bat around things on the ground, leaves or small toys or whatever, but never something living."

It seemed like the Educated Rodents could be a remarkably forgiving bunch, if they were even willing to travel with someone who had _eaten_ one of their own, intentional or not. "Well, uh... glad to hear he gave up the people-eating habit?" Come to think of it, it seemed like this cat had stronger moral fiber than many people in the Commonwealth although, really, they had been _written_ that way. Could they be expected to help themselves any more than the cat had before he had ‘caught the talking’?

Flavours nodded. "We didn't find out about that until near the end, though... some of us suspected it was something like that well before. Anyway, like I said, he was the one who came up with the whole Piper-con. Found a boy willing to go along with it, and we'd go into a town, stir up a little trouble for awhile, then he'd come in and offer his services for a fee. He'd play his pipe and we'd all go dancing after him, just like in the stories. No one'd try stiffing us because, well, everyone _knows_ what happens when you don't pay the piper even though, really, there's not much we could have done. Maurice was more... the ideas cat. Claimed that cats were good at getting what they wanted to out of people, and... well, I guess he's right. Just think about it!” 

"Humans changed dogs _so much_ when deciding to let them live around. Horses, maybe not so much, but they still have to spend most of their day doing work for humans that they wouldn't be doing on their own. Most everything else humans keep, it's because they get food or clothes out of them. But cats? All cats had to do was show up and say- well, not literally say, of course, because we're talking dumb cats here, but you know what I mean- all they had to do was show up and basically say, 'I'm going to catch and eat rodents. I'm not doing it for you, it's totally what I would have done anyway. But in exchange, you're going to feed us and give us shelter and help us take care of our little ones and give us affection when we want it. We're still not doing anything extra that we weren't doing anyway, but you're going to do all that for us.' And what did the humans do? 'Sure, kitty, sounds great for us! Here's some milk!'" Flavours sat back so he could throw his front paws up in exasperation. 

Nick chuckled. "You're sounding kind of jealous there."

"Yes. Ugh." And the rat flopped back down. "I can't even blame them because again, they're just dumb cats. They just... got a natural talent for manipulating humans, I guess." He smoothed a bit of Nick's cloak down beneath him. "But I guess Maurice did alright by us in the end. He was the one who proposed the Arrangement. Got what he wanted right out of the humans of Bad Blintz, but somewhere along the way he decided that what he wanted was a home for us where we could live honestly. It wasn't no island refuge, but... I think for most of us, it's better. Some of us are real social, you know-"

"You don't say," Nick interrupted, feigning surprise.

"Ha ha. But yeah. This lets the ones that like being around humans do that, and the rest can just stay underground, so... maybe not according to plan, but maybe the plan was selling ourselves short, anyway. Still, gotta be incredible to be a cat. All you gotta do is just what you do anyway, and humans are falling all over themselves to get you what you want." He leaned over towards Nick and added, conspiratorially, "I think it's the purr."

* * *

By checking who had and had not had their mail delivered, Valentine and Flavours were able to ballpark where Dilibrat had vanished. They ended up examining a bakery, which protested allowing in a rat officer but turned out to be including a generous helping of sawdust in its flour. It did not, however, contain a missing golem. The women’s clothing store didn’t want either the rat or the clockwork man. They were hiding underpaid gnome labour.

The nearby meeting hall let them in. They even gave them a copy of the schedule. Various interest groups and crackpot cults met there. Valentine and Flavours examined the place carefully, and in a waste bin, Valentine found an old, tattered scrap of linen paper with a script similar to what he’d seen over the door of the Golem Trust. He looked at it solemnly and shook his head and said to Flavours, “I think we’re basically looking at Dilibrat’s brain, here.”

“Tidy,” said Flavours, though he looked squeamish, curling against Valentine’s neck.

If the piece of paper was the chem, where was the body? Carting off a golem would be difficult in the best of conditions. Valentine and Flavours examined the floor for drag marks, and… drag marks, no, but they could about make out some dents in the wood where Dilibrat might have stepped.

So Dilibrat had been moving under his own power.

The schedule said it was an unlisted group that had been meeting about when Dilibrat had gone missing. Questioning the meeting hall owner, he said that group were new. Typical robed cultists.

Had some weird glowing rocks, and their troll was high as a kite.

Valentine took a moment to underline a few things in his notebook and asked the meeting hall owner to please notify the Watch if that group came here again.

Then he and Flavours tried to follow the dents in the floor to figure out where Dilibrat could have gone - without his chem! Maybe out into the back alley… where there was a sewer.

They explored the sewer. Here and there, they found scrape marks that could have been Dilibrat or could have been anything. Flavours ran across some of the Patrician’s rats - they were a different breed of magic rat than he was, but he could talk to them well enough. They hadn’t been there at the time, and as such, they hadn’t seen anything.

The Patrician had his own magic rats.

Ankh-Morpork was a doozy of a city.

* * *

Nick knew why some people assumed he was a golem at first glance. They could see the exposed metal. It was relatively common knowledge that golems could be made with things besides clay, and those things included metal. He had the glowing eyes. The connection actually got clearer the more one knew about both robots and golems: things, tools, often human-shaped, designed to operate themselves but show obedience and deference to humans, but who had become people in their own right despite that. Tools that obeyed the chem-code-words in their heads, at least until they became people-enough to make their own words. They weren’t really the same thing, more like metaphors for each other, but Nick could at least understand why Sam, who had been the first man in his world to hire a freed golem, had latched onto that metaphor in Nick’s world.

Still, Nick _wasn’t_ a golem, and while he knew at least as much about them as the typical Ankh-Morpork Watchman (which, given that the Watch was the first organization to employ free golems, was actually a fair bit more than average), given his newest case, he needed to know a lot more, so he took Artificial Flavours to find the golem Sergeant Dorfl. 

Dorfl worked nearly continuously, with no days off or breaks except what was necessary to tend to the Golem Trust. In exchange, he earned twice the standard rate of a Constable. All in all, the Watch was still getting the better end of that deal. When Nick had first found out about the Golems’ Deal, he had considered trying to negotiate something similar but had decided against it. Sure, he didn’t need as much down time as a human, but Nick was a very social animal (even if he wasn’t technically an animal), and here was a whole huge city to explore and people to get to know, and you couldn’t always do the sort of socializing and exploration that he cared for while on duty.

The down-side of trying to find a policeman who was almost always on patrol was that, well, he was almost always on patrol. Still, Dorfl showed up at the Watch house from time to time to report in and do paperwork, which he approached with the same thorough patience that he approached everything. Fortunately, Nick didn’t have to wait too long before the large clay figure came plodding his way through Pseudopolis Yard.

Nick straightened as he approached. “Sergeant Dorfl,” he greeted with a nod, which Dorfl returned.

“Greetings Constable Valentine And Lance-Constable Artificial Flavours,” the hollow voice replied.

“You got a moment?”

“I Have Many Moments,” Dorfl explained, “But I Assume You Mean To Say That You Wish Me To Give You Some Of Those Moments So We May Speak.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s right,” Nick replied, rubbing the back of his neck. He’d have to keep in mind that golems tended towards the more literal side of Discworld thought-spectrum. Dorfl continued his way into the Watch Headquarters and Nick fell in beside him. “So you know that Flavours and I have been assigned the Dilibrat case, right?”

“Yes. I Appreciate That. Just As I Appreciate That The Case Was Never Considered As A Stolen Property Case.”

“Damned if I’m going to turn it over to them now that I’ve got it, anyway,” Nick muttered.

“While I Am Uncertain That Damnation Is, In Fact, A Possibility, I Appreciate The Sentiment.”

“Sure, only maybe not say that first bit so loud?” Artificial Flavours said, shifting nervously on Nick’s shoulder and glancing towards the ceiling. Nick hoped that being indoors helped, but that was another difference between him and golems: golems were usually lightning-proof, Nick, not so much.

“Anyway, first off, I was wondering if you could explain to me what this means?” Nick held up a sheet of paper that he had used to copy the inscription he had seen on the plaque outside the Golem Trust.

“It Means, ‘By Our Own Hand, Or None.’ It Expresses Our Determination To Gain Our Freedom Legally, Through Our Own Effort. We Do Occasionally Hire Non-Golems, Just As We Rely On Others To Hire Us, But They Are Paid Fairly For Their Work, Just As We Wish To Be Paid Fairly For Ours.”

“Nice idea. Really only works where you have owners willing to make the sale, and a legal authority able to respect and enforce it, don’t it?” Nick observed, thinking of the situation of the Gen 3 synths back in the Commonwealth.

“That Is True, Constable Valentine, And You Have, In Fact, Identified Why I Desired To Become A Watchman. In A World With No Law, Even Freedom Can Be Stolen. Thus, Freedom Requires Constraints To Survive And Thrive.”

“What happens when a golem’s owner refuses to sell?” Flavours asked.

“We Wait. Eventually, The Owner Will Change Their Mind, Or Will Die And The Golem Will Pass To A New Owner. We Are Very Long Lived. The Youngest Of Us Number Our Life Span In Centuries, The Oldest, Tens Of Millennium. We Can Afford To Be Patient. Are Made For It, In Fact.”

Artificial Flavours, whose lifespan was extremely long when compared with a non-talking rat, but still short by human standards, observed, “That’s an awful long time to wait for freedom!”

“Anything Worth Having Is Worth Waiting For,” Dorfl’s hollow voice echoed.

“Can you explain chems to me?” Nick asked.

“I Can Do My Best,” Dorfl replied solemnly. “Chems Contain The Holy Words That Give Life And Direction To Most Golems. Usually, They Are Written On Paper Or Linen Using One Of The Ancient Holy Languages And Then Placed Within Our Heads, And We Are Animated. Sometimes, They Are Inscribed Directly In Our Clay. Words On Paper Can Be Changed, Taken, Or Replaced. Usually, A Golem Without A Chem Falls Inactive.”

“Usually?” asked Nick.

“My Own Chem Was Destroyed, Along With My Receipt.” Dorfl explained. “Despite This, I Am Still Animate. Alone Among The Golems, I Have Been Allowed To Find My Own Words. We Have Not Yet Found A Way To Reliably Reproduce What Happened To Me, At Least Not By Simply Removing Another Golem’s Chem. Perhaps Destruction Is Necessary, But We Have Been Reluctant To Try. If We Are Wrong, It Would Be Murder And Theft, And Neither Are Acceptable.”

“I see murder, but how’s it theft?” Artificial Flavours squeaked.

“What Is Murder But Theft Of Life?” Dorfl replied. “But Not Only That, It Is Theft Of Their Words, And Until We Can Be Certain A Golem Is Able To Find Their Own Words, It Would Be Wrong To Take The Words Given To Them.”

“But yours were destroyed,” reminded Nick.

At first, Dorfl did not answer, and so the synthetic man and the educated rodent accompanied the man of clay to his desk. Finally, Dorfl sat down and said sadly, “There Were Many Wrongs Done Before I Was Remade Right.”

Nick nodded and let Dorfl have his silence for a moment, then attempted to pull the conversation back to the more immediate issue. “So these holy words… they give golems life, when you take them away, the golems are no longer animated. They can be changed or adjusted, though, and… is it still the same golem?”

“Usually, But In Modern Times, We Restrict Ourselves To Minor Adjustments. It Is Hard To Say How Much Of A Chem Can Change For A Golem To Remain The Same. There Would Likely Be At Least Some Of The Memory Carried Over, Because The Clay Remembers.” Dorfl seemed quite certain of that last statement, but then, he would be. “But It Is Hard To Say How Much Of A Person Is Memories, And How Much Is Mind, And How Much Of One Or The Other Can Be Changed And The Person Still Be The Same Person.”

Nick smiled wryly. “Yeah, I… think I understand that. So that would be why you’d want as much of the clay as possible if one gets… broken. Because the clay remembers. But you’d also want their original chem.”

“That Would Be Preferred. Again, Perhaps Another Golem Would Be Able To Find His Own Words. That Would Be… Nice. But Dilibrat Did Not Yet Have His Receipt. If His Body Is Shattered And His Chem Is Gone, It Is More Likely That… Dilibrat Is Also Gone.”

“Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” Nick said, instinctively trying to reassure his fellow officer. “We don’t know _what_ happened to Dilibrat yet, and I did manage to find his chem. I’m just trying to get a feel for what else I should be looking for, and what else I need to be bringing back. I’m also trying to establish a basis of comparison here.”

“That Is A Sensible Step,” Dorfl rumbled approvingly. “The Problem Is, Our Knowledge Is Limited. Golems Are Very Old, But Freed Golems Are Very New. Even Those Who Still Have Their Old Words In Their Heads Are Still Learning What It Means To Be Their Own Masters. The Chems Make Golems Obedient to Their Owner. When A Golem Is Their Own Owner, That Means They Are Obedient To Themselves. But Just As There Were Always Limits Imposed By The Chems To What A Golem Would Do When Obeying An Owner, There Are Now Limits In What A Freed Golem With A Chem Can Do When Obeying Their Own Nature.”

Nick thought about this. Then he asked, “Alright. So to free a golem, you put their receipt in their head. This makes them their own owner.”

“That Is Correct.”

“So what happens if someone takes the receipt out of a freed golem?”

“That Is Theft,” observed Dorfl.

“Dorfl, you’re a policeman. You know that theft happens.”

“That Is True. That Is, In Fact, Part Of Why I Am A Policeman,” the golem explained simply. “In This Case, It Is Not Just Theft Of The Golem’s Receipt, But Theft Of Their Freedom. They Would No Longer Have Proof That They Own Themselves.”

“Would they have to obey the person who took their receipt?” Flavours asked.

Dorfl considers the matter. “I Think That Some Would. There Is… Room For Interpretation. We Golems Earn Our Freedom. We Pay For It Legally, And Receive Our Receipts In Return. A Person Who Stole A Receipt Is Not The Legal Owner Of The Thing The Receipt Represents, They Did Not Earn It, They Did Not Pay For It. But A Clever Person Could Perhaps Convince Someone That Holding The Receipt Is The Same As Owning The Thing. There Is A Saying, ‘Possession Is Nine-Tenths Of The Law.’ This Is Not True, Of Course, But Enough People Behave As If It Is That It Can, At Times, Become A Sort Of De Facto Truth.”

“So this is really just another one of those things where we don’t have enough cases to really know _how_ it works,” Nick said thoughtfully, crossing his arms.

“Yes,” answered Dorfl.

“Isn’t it kind of scary, the idea that someone could just… snatch your receipt and steal your freedom?” Flavours asked worriedly.

“Freedom Is Frightening,” Dorfl observed. “And It Is Also Precarious. But I Think This Is As True For Others As It Is For Golems.”

Nick thought about the Gen 3 synths of the Commonwealth, who could have their freedom stolen with a reset code spoken out loud, or the number of human slaves that could be found in his world. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right about that,” he said. “Anyway, thanks for the answers. If I think of anything else I think you can help with, I’ll make sure to track you down.”

“Of Course, Constable Valentine. And If I Think Of Anything To Help You With Your Case, I Will Seek You Out.”

* * *

It was late at night when someone pounded on Nick’s door. Nick didn’t need sleep, but he did need the occasional diagnostics run or memory defragmention. He had just finished the former when he was startled out of his narrow bed. “What?” It was only a couple steps to snatch open the door. “Hey, can you keep it down, the landla-” and then his glowing optics widened in shock. “Sam? What-?!”

Sam Vimes was in his uniform. He pushed past Nick, shouting, “He’s here! That son of a bitch is here, in Ankh-Morpork!” He spun towards Nick and pointed vaguely towards the door. “That bastard’s out there, and he’s still got his gun with him! The gall, the absolute nerve, to bring a gun into _my_ city! This is it, Nick! We are going to find him, and we are going to drag him into the light, and his gu-”

Nick grabbed Sam by the shoulders and tried to get his attention. “Sam! Calm down! What the hell are you even going on about?” Then something else occurred to him. “And what are you even doing here? How’d you find this place?”

Vimes blinked and then frowned. “Nick, I’m your Commander, your address is on record.”

Nick sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his synth-flesh hand. “Well, okay, but why?”

“Because you’re the only one in the City who’d understand!” he shouted. 

“Not if you don’t explai-”

“The Stranger.”

That got his attention. Valentine’s eyes widened, and the amber circles of his optics blazed brighter for just a second. “Him?!” He pushed past Vimes - there was really no choice in the tiny apartment - and lunged for the small table that served as his desk, snatching up a notebook. “What happened?”

“I was on Easy Street when a bloody radstag came charging down the road, sent carts swerving and people running. I was in the process of aiming my crossbow when that bastard showed up, fired his gods damned gun, and vanished. Couldn’t get a look at where he got off to.”

Nick made a few notes but sighed. “That was pretty much how it always went…”

“Yeah, but now he’s in _my_ city,” Vimes growled. “I know every inch of this place like the back of my hand. Better, because I look at it a lot more than I look at my hand. I can tell where I am by the cobblestones. I can find my way blindfolded, if that’s what it comes down to!” 

“Wouldn’t recommend going after the Stranger blindfolded, Sam,” Valentine smirked. 

Vimes sighed and sat down in Nick’s single rickety chair, rubbing his forehead. “Sorry I suggested this stuff was just happening around you, Nick. Clearly, something bigger’s going on.”

Valentine put his notebook down on the table in front of Vimes and opened it up to a different section. “Sam, I want you to see something.” In the notebook, he had a number of clippings from the Times carefully affixed to the pages. “I’ve been checking the newspaper pretty close lately, looking for descriptions of things that looked like they could be from my world, if you squint right. Problem is… you notice most of these aren’t clear. Just a couple of sentences, buried in the paper because whoever wrote it thought it was newsworthy enough to mention, but not unusual enough to spend a lot of time on.”

Vimes frowned as he looked the clippings over. “But wouldn’t Piper or Nat recognize-” 

Valentine shook his head. “Not if they were just getting secondhand reports and bad descriptions, rather than seeing the things themselves. At least not until today’s,” and Nick pointed at the newest clipping. This one had Piper’s byline and clearly stated, “Bloat Flies Cause Disturbance At Cattle Market.” Like the others, it only contained a quick description and looked like it had come later in the paper, presumably because Piper had had a hard time convincing de Worde that no, really, these big flies at the Cattle Market were really worth paying attention to.

Sam studied the pages for a moment longer, then closed the notebook and handed it back to Valentine. Then Commander Vimes stood up. “Nick, bring that in tomorrow. We need to get all the officers trained on how to tell Commonwealth incursions from Ankh-Morpork background noise, and you’re the best one for the job.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Before you come in, pop by the University and see if the wizards can give us any iconographs from that game. That might help.”

Valentine nodded. “You want me to let them in on what’s going on while I’m there?”

“Oh, good gods no, Nick! When reality starts getting thin, pretty much the worst thing you can do is start throwing magic at the problem! Magic tends to make things less real, and that’s pretty much the last thing we want.” Commander Vimes shook his head. “No, once you get those iconographs, we leave the wizards out of it unless we have no choice. But for now… for now, we don’t even have enough pieces to put together a clear picture.” He nodded at the notebook. “Teaching the others what to look for, and the right terms to use in their reports, should give us more to work with.”

Valentine thought that this might actually be the first time he’d gotten a good look at Commander Vimes. Up until then, anytime they encountered each other on the job it had been brief, and Sam had done everything he could to avoid Nick, but here and now, once given the information Valentine had put together, Sam had slipped seamlessly into Commander Vimes.

Valentine could see why the other Watchmen held him in such high esteem.

The synth nodded. “Well all right. I’ll have that put together for you tomorrow.” Then he caught the Commander’s eye and ventured. “Er… Sam? Do you ever think maybe… maybe it was a mistake to bring us over?”

Sam was shocked right out of Commander. “What? Nick, how could you even say that?!”

“Sam, look, this whole mess…” he gestured. “This whole thing is clearly, well, fallout from what happened. We don’t know where it’s leading yet, but people have already been hurt, and there’s an officer dead. Maybe… maybe if you guys hadn’t given life to a bunch of game characters, we wouldn’t have real people at risk now.”

Sam grabbed Valentine by his shoulders. “Nick, don’t say that, don’t even think it. You were already real before we pulled you out of there. You know that. You heard what Hex had to say. You may not have had a physical body, but your mind was as real as mine was by the end.” He let Nick go and shook his head. “You know… Vetinari actually asked about that. What I told _him_ was that you people had already become real, confirmed by Hex, and that it seemed to me that making real people unreal wouldn’t have done anything to keep the world from getting less real. And that was true enough, but… look. There’s already a word for turning real people unreal. It’s called ‘murder.’”

Sam looked up and reached for Nick’s left shoulder with his right hand, laying it gently in place. “Nick. There’s no way I could have just left you in there and come back to the real world, because there’s no timeline, no reality where I could have murdered you.”

* * *

Valentine could pass off going to the High Energy Magic Building to ask for iconographs from the game as a social visit, and so he did. There was no other Watchman, aside from Commander Vimes himself, who had any particular reason to have that specific interest, and Valentine was, despite being inhuman, still less attention-grabbing than a Duke. The building wasn’t where he’d left it last time, which was always sort of irritating, but after several wrong turns, he finally found it.

Ponder was out, but several of his graduate students were there, including Chatur Bakshi, who was Klatchian; Zinon Elias, from Ephebe; Xian Ju, from the Agatean Empire; and Alf Nealy, from Old New Lane in Dolly Sisters. They all looked ragged and sleepless. DiMA was also around, sitting down with a stack of papers and a red quill pen. He appeared to be grading them. Valentine’s first thought was that he had no idea why DiMA would be doing that; he somehow doubted that even actual wizards graded papers. His second thought was that Ankh-Morpork was getting to him.

Valentine explained what he wanted to Chatur, who looked over at DiMA and called, “Hey, you have a minute to look up a few base IDs? Radstags -”

“0008ca3c,” DiMA answered without looking up. He was still wearing the silvery robe with the odd slits and ties to accommodate his form and the pale gold lightning bolts. It was just as well; the only place that DiMA could get away with the electrical tape pants would have been the Blue Cat Club, and that had to be the last place DiMA would ever go.

Chatur laughed, “Offler’s teeth, I knew you were going through all the code line by line, but you have the base IDs memorized?”

“Yes,” said DiMA, who, in Nick’s opinion, really didn’t need to be filling up his head with more junk, but he made a note to later ask why the line by line code review.

Chatur handed the list of common creatures and enemies to DiMA, who scribed out their base IDs next to them. Nosy as ever, Valentine casually wandered over to look at DiMA’s grading and saw what looked more like English homework than what Nick expected of wizard homework, though Nick didn’t know what he expected wizard homework to look like. Written neatly in red in one of the margins was, ‘This is absolutely incorrect, but you defended yourself well. Full marks.’

Valentine squinted and asked, “What are you grading?” even though what he wanted to ask was, ‘ _Why_ are you grading?’

“This is the coursework for Basic Narrativium, a junior-level class,” explained DiMA. “Narrativium being the most common element on the disc, although not included in the list of the standard five: earth, fire, air, water, and surprise.”

“Uh...huh,” said Valentine, crossing his arms.

Chatur took the list of base IDs back from DiMA and said, “We’ll have these iconographs done for you, Mr. Valentine. No trouble at all.”

Xian pulled a leather-bound sketchbook off the shelf and opened it up, commenting, “You might find this interesting.” He flipped a few pages and showed Valentine a lovingly rendered painting of himself under a streetlamp near the Memory Den. “You were one of the first characters we came up with, you know?”

Alf added, “It was still set somewhere else, then. We hadn’t placed it in the Commonwealth yet. Mister Stibbons still has the design doc in his desk, the original design doc. And in that design doc, the one thing, the one holdover is the character of Nick Valentine. Didn’t you turn out nicely.” He looked Nick over with something like satisfaction.

“Er,” said Nick Valentine, staring blankly at nothing in particular, desperately trying to shove down another existential crisis that was welling up, but it was damn hard, what with Xian waving Nick’s own concept art in his face! His own fictionality confronted him with cold, hard proof, and Nick completely forgot what else he was going to ask about. He thanked the wizards and walked straight to the Bucket, where he ordered a whiskey because the Disc had never invented a bourbon, and he stared at the wall until it was time for him to go on duty. 

* * *

It had been a long day. Unfortunately, with all the business of training the Watch to recognize Commonwealth intrusions, Valentine and Flavours hadn’t made any progress on the Dilibrat case, and given the conversation that morning, Nick hadn’t been in a mood to stay late, so he’d returned home to go back over his notes.

A knock on his door awoke Nick from a diagnostic check at 3:04 AM. It had taken him longer than he wanted to admit in order to reset his internal chronometer to Ankh-Morpork time, which sidled and ambled, rather than proceeding in an orderly fashion, but he’d still managed to set up his chronometer in his first few days in the city, and so he was quite sure that it was 3:04 AM, which was no time for anyone who was up to anything good to be up. He would know.

DiMA was at his door, and Nick snapped, “I know I didn’t tell you where my apartment is.” He had done so for a reason.

“You did not,” agreed DiMA. “Hex did,” and he pushed into the tiny little apartment. “It was a trivial matter to examine the housing market at the time, and your salary as a Watchman is a matter of public record, and factoring in your own particular inclinations, this is where Hex said you would be, and here you are.”

DiMA looked… bad, seeing him now standing up, close up, and not sitting down. The robe covered more of him, so there was less than usual to see, some of the damage and wear hidden, but the other synth simply seemed unwell in a way that maybe Valentine could relate to. It had been bad enough for Nick, to hear those wizards talking about him as a character in a story when he was right there, but DiMA had been sitting there, too, and he had also been a character in that story. DiMA had to put up with those chucklehead wizards all day? Of course they’d get a synth down. No wonder he buried his nose in grading papers and, the thought returned to Nick, going over the game’s code line by line. He’d meant to ask about that, hadn’t he?

DiMA had a bag much like a school satchel with him, and he withdrew a folder from it and held it out to Nick. “Your iconographs.”

“Thanks,” said Nick, taking the glossies and flipping through them. “But it’s 3:05 AM.”

“Yes,” agreed DiMA, who looked lost. The other synth touched his own forehead and looked around Nick’s sparse little apartment, like he was looking for words. “You saw your concept art. You were a part of the story from the first.”

“Kind of trying not to think about that, bud,” Nick said, frowning. 

DiMA continued, “We have been trying to return the game to functional status.”

“And why would you wanna do a thing like that?” snapped Nick. He put the folder with the glossies down on his desk, and he looked at his liquor rack. He’d fished it out of the trash before one of Harry King’s kids could. It was amazing the kinds of things people threw away. Nick pulled the scumble out of the rack and poured himself a shot.

Scumble could eat through metal. That was why Nick would be chasing it with Bearhugger's. 

DiMA folded his hands. “Why we are allowed to be doing the work and why I would wish to do the work are two separate questions, and the answer to the first involved a locked door discussion between Ponder Stibbons, Archchancellor Ridcully, and Lady Regina Rust to which I was not privy.”

Nick groaned, but DiMA went on, avoiding the second question, which he himself had proposed, and instead taking a tangent, “You were a part of the story from the first, but the game that Sam Vimes played is not the game as it was originally coded. Modifications were made as the game progressed.” DiMA peered at Nick. “Yes, even modifications to you. Expansions were added. You see, a Lady Rust or a Viscount Skater would not care about a Kasumi Nakano, but your Sam Vimes did, very much, and so he followed the game to the edge of its map, and confronted with the edge of the map, Sam’s sheer stubbornness led Hex to add an expansion.” There was a slight tremble to DiMA’s voice. “I have the timestamp from Hex’s changelogs of when I was first created.”

“Uh, lemme know when, and I’ll get you a card for your birthday?” joked Nick, downing his shot of scumble. It was definitely a scumble morning.

“Sam was travelling with you when he came to Far Harbor, and there was the lingering plot thread of why you had been discarded on the trash.” DiMA looked sorrowful. “I was the answer. I was made as a further exploration of the story of Nick Valentine, because it seemed that story very much interested Sam. Just as Sam saw how so many people loved you in Diamond City, he was shown how I had my own enclave, my own synths who cared about me, as deliberate narrative parallelism. If you wanted to help people, I would also want to help, in my own way, but the parallels must, inevitably, set up for contrasts.” His expression and tone turned darker. “If your wires are copper, then mine had to be synthetic sin. That is how story structure works. The narrative nearly demanded that the detective have a criminal for a brother, to sharpen the contrast, for we see not by the thing itself but by the edge of the thing, the silhouette. I am your shadow on the wall, the darkness by which your light may be seen, not the thing itself at all.”

DiMA pulled out a copy of Jane Gordon's _Pride and Extreme Prejudice_ , a story of a policeman and a criminal, from his satchel and placed it on Nick's desk. Then he collapsed down on the edge of of Nick’s bed, and he held his head. “All that I wanted, all that I was, my dreams for Acadia, for synth kind - it was all just a way for Sam Vimes to know you, just as you are only a way for Sam Vimes to know what choices he would make in a different setting. All just a story.”

“Yeah, yeah, you're not bad, you're just drawn that way,” Nick said irritably. He sat down next to DiMA on the bed and lit a cigarette. 

DiMA looked up at Nick. “Of course, that is only one layer of the story. Did you notice Hex has a FTB?” A fluffy teddy bear. As it was, the detective had noticed, but Hex had an anthill, a beehive, and an aquarium, too. The fluffy teddy bear was hardly the oddest thing about the Disc’s first mainframe. “Ponder Stibbons is a good creator,” high praise from DiMA, “but Hex can _think_ , and Hex can think, ‘What if Ponder Stibbons wasn't?’ Nick, you and I are Hex’s anxiety about a world where artificial intelligence was not treated as kindly by its makers.”

A mainframe had anxiety? Well, the mainframe already had its fluffy teddy bear to deal with that anxiety… 

“Uhm. Good analysis, DiMA, but I think you're kinda making yourself sick with this thinking? Maybe lay off the Basic Narrativium,” said Nick, who was wishing he had DiMA’s ability for more targeted forgetfulness. 

DiMA just sat on the edge of the bed and sobbed. Nick couldn't cry, and he couldn't remember if he'd ever been able to, but DiMA was making a game attempt. He asked, “You want a shot of scumble?”

DiMA paused in sobbing long enough to say, “No.” Then he asked, “Does it help?”

“No,” said Nick. 

They were both quiet for a while, long enough for Nick to finish his cigarette, which he put out in his ashtray. Then, lacking any better ideas, he gave DiMA a hug. DiMA awkwardly hugged him back and admitted, “I don't know what I’m going to do with myself.”

“For one thing, a good tune up wouldn't go amiss,” said Nick, wrinkling his nose and poking DiMA’s shoulder. “You need to look after yourself. Can't have my only brother going to pieces on me both metaphorically and physically.”

DiMA said miserably, “And the parallelism is there, as well, that you had your people who looked after you, as evinced by how Ellie Perkins sent the Sole Survivor to find you or how Hancock executed the insurance agent who threatened you, and I… I had Faraday and…”

Nick put his finger to DiMA’s lips. “No more narrativium right now.”

DiMA corrected, “Narrativium is the substance, and it is inescapable. You are speaking of my existential despair over narrative causality.”

“Fine. Right. Cut it out, okay? I mean it. You're in this bind because you're thinking too much, but you're thinking. You're not trapped in a story anymore, and maybe you don't know what you want to do, but the wanting and doing are yours now,” said Nick. “It doesn't do a man good to reflect too much on the circumstances of his conception, and that goes double for us.”

“I suppose,” said DiMA, uncertainly. 

DiMA needed something to distract him that wasn't going line by line through the proof of his fictional origin, and Nick thought back about the folder of iconographs and the difficulty of differentiating Commonwealth weirdness from Disc weirdness. He didn't want to have to borrow Sam's Pip-Boy again, and maybe he was looking at this backwards. “Hey, y’know Geiger counters? Is there a magic equivalent?”

“A small, portable thaumometer?” DiMA rubbed his chin. “Such a device does exist, but I am unsure if it would work for you. Old wizards just lick their fingers and hold them up to the wind to sense the magic level in an area.”

Nick sighed. It had been an idea, anyway. “If you hear anything more about why Rust wants that game up and running, let me know?”

“I can do that,” said DiMA. He picked up _Pride and Extreme Prejudice_ and put it back in his satchel. He stood and smiled wanly. “Thank you. For listening.”

“Sure. Any time,” grunted Nick, certain he would regret that. 

* * *

Old Longfellow awoke on a boat. It wasn’t the first time that’d happened. He looked around. Not much had changed. He went back to sleep.

* * *

Several of the Commonwealthers had decided to meet up at Harga's House of Ribs. These meetings, whose locations varied, had become a semi-regular occurrence, especially shortly after one of Garvey's letters had found their way back to Ankh-Morpork.

Nick Valentine arrived a bit late, having only just come off duty. He was still in uniform and had invited Artificial Flavours to come along with him. Flavours knew from experience that when he went out with a large group that included humans, particularly those of the feminine persuasion, he could generally count on a full belly at no expense to him, so he had happily agreed. Nick inclined his head to greet the others. "Piper, Nat, Deacon," he said as he slipped into his seat. Flavours scrambled down his arm and onto the table.

Nat peered at the rat. “Nick, you brought a spy to the table,” she observed.

“Nat, he’s not some kind of Institute Watcher,” Nick corrected, sounding a little tired. “He’s on temporary transfer from Bad Blintz. I’ve been assigned to help with his training.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean an Institute rat. I meant one of the Patrician’s.” Nat peered up at the synth. “So he’s your partner?”

"Why don't you ask him? He's right there."

"Hello, miss!" squeaked Flavours, sensing an opportunity and hamming it up a bit more than usual. "I am, indeed, Nick Valentine's partner! Artificial Flavours is the name, Flavours for short, please, and I am very pleased to meet you." He actually performed a little rodenty bow, and Nick sighed.

“So the synthetic man now comes with Artificial Flavours,” Deacon observed, amused. He had already met the rodent, but he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity for a bad pun. “Funny.”

“Yeah, good one, Deacon,” Valentine replied dryly, “I hadn’t heard that one before.” Or, indeed, thought it himself. He then frowned as he took a closer look at Deacon and spotted some discoloration that his shades didn’t entirely cover. “Is that a black eye?”

Deacon casually waved off his concerns. “Ah, yeah. See, a group of… had to be ten, fifteen anti-Golem thugs caught up with me as I was opening up the Trust the other day. All things considered, I got off pretty light. My own fault, really, shouldn’t have let my guard down. I know better than that.”

“That’s funny,” Nat observed, “when I interviewed Klug about what happened, he said there were only three of them.”

Deacon’s face broke into a broad grin, and he chuckled. “Okay, yeah, you got me, there were only three of them. But the rest is true, including me feeling like an idiot for letting them get the drop on me. It’s nothing, though, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’ll heal right up in a few days.”

“I gotta say, Nick, it is really _weird_ seeing you without that old trench coat and fedora,” Piper grinned.

Nick shrugged. “I’m a proper Watchman now. That means wearing the uniform.” He considered the Watch armory, which contained breastplates and helms stretching back for centuries in a variety of historical styles. “Even if it’s not a particularly uniform uniform. Besides, it’s got its purpose. Good at deflecting some attacks, though Reg has already warned me that it’s no good against a crossbow bolt dead-on.” He looked down and absently brushed at the breastplate, noticing that the dwarf armorer had shined it up a bit after modifying it. He’d have to deal with that: too much shine could make him easier to target. 

A middle-aged, graying waitress storms up to the table, shouting at Artificial Flavours, “Get off the table! Shoo!”

Artificial Flavours bristled and sat up very straight while the others tensed. “Ex _cuse_ me, I’m a _customer!_ ” the rat protested.

The waitress stopped, and her eyes widened. She blinked, then looked around the table, her gaze staying a bit longer on Nick Valentine as something clicked in her mind. “Oh, Offler, you’re Sammies! Sorry about that, sirs,” she said, hurriedly fumbling out a notebook, “didn’t realize you were a talker, sir. Terribly sorry. Can I, uhm, get you something?”

It always felt a bit odd to Nick, being called a ‘Sammy’. From what he’d heard, the term had taken an even bigger hold outside of Ankh-Morpork, but he still heard it from time to time inside the city walls. 

“I’ll take an all-you-can-gobble and a beer,” said Deacon.

“Same,” said Piper.

“Same,” said Nat, but Piper gave her a light swat on the arm. 

“She’ll have apple juice,” Piper corrected. The beer might have been safer than the apple juice, actually, but Nat was a Diamond City girl, and she could survive Ankh-Morpork apple juice. 

“Just a beer,” Nick said.

“I’ll have to consider my options,” Artificial Flavours said primly. He was hoping to mooch off the others’ plates and was a little frustrated that the waitress’s arrival had called so much attention to his non-ordering.

“Right, that’ll be right out,” the waitress said and beat a hasty retreat before she could embarrass herself further.

Nat peered at Artificial Flavours. “Rats eat… pretty much anything, right?”

“Pretty much,” the rat admitted.

“Do you want some of my barbeque?”

Score! “I would love some of your barbeque, Nat, thank you for offering.”

Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose and shook his head slightly, then he lowered his hand and looked up at Piper. “So I hear our wandering Minuteman’s sent another missive home?”

“That’s right,” answered Piper, who received the letters by virtue of having been the first to have given him a permanent address to write to, even if it had been the office of the Times. “He’s still over in Hergen. Grand Trunk’s been trying to build a line to Smork, but the tower construction sites keep running into problems, so his team was sent in to help.”

“Gotta get comms to those outlying settlements, I guess,” smirked Nick. “What’s the hold-up, then?”

“Dragon problems,” Piper answered, shifting a little to let the waitress set a drink in front of her.

“That doesn’t sound so ba-” Nick started, thinking at first of the swamp dragons that Sybil raised, but he interrupted himself in the middle of removing a thimble from an inner cloak pocket, his optics brightening. “Wait a minute…”

“Yeah, these would be the big ones, right, Piper?” Deacon clarified, glancing at the reporter. She nodded. “Yeah, I remember hearing something about that from Adora. So he’s out there fighting dragons, huh? Guess I’ll have to step up my game if I don’t want to be outdone next time he’s back in town. ‘Hey, Deacon, what’ve you been up to?’ ‘Oh, just fending off vicious attacks while helping golems work towards their freedom. You?’ ‘Oh, not much, just slaying dragons!’”

Nat, Piper, and Flavours chuckled while Nick observed, “Yeah, but you know he’ll probably be real humble about it or something.” He carefully poured some of the beer the waitress had just set in front of him into the thimble which he set in front of Artificial Flavours, who picked it up with both paws to drink from it. 

“That just makes it worse,” Deacon answered, although his tone still held his usual good humor. “At this rate, he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t lose a limb.” He picked up his own recently arrived drink.

“He has,” said both Piper and Nat at the same time.

“What? Really?” 

“You missed the last one, right?” Nat asked. “I think it was druids in Llamedos or something along those lines, but his team has an Igor with them so he’s fine.”

“I got the impression he was more upset about losing the arm of that greatcoat of his,” Nick observed.

“What? He lost his coat’s arm?” Deacon asked. “Well, that is a tragedy, I don’t blame him for being upset.”

“Hey, I don’t suppose he has a camera with him?” Among the locals, Nick would use the term “iconograph” to avoid confusion, but damn it, they were cameras, and that was just easier to say. “I bet Sybil and the boys would love to see some decent pictures of the dragons.”

“Oh, sure, I’ll ask,” answered Piper. “We managed to get a few pictures of them at the paper, but so far they’re pretty bad quality. Actually, Otto’s been talking about making a trip out there himself.” At this point, the food was beginning to arrive. Nat carefully sectioned off a portion of what appeared to be pulled pork and pushed it to the edge of her plate nearest to Artificial Flavours.

“That’s the vampire that keeps dusting himself, right?” Deacon asked.

Piper grinned. “Yeah, that’s the one. He’s a real trip. Great photographer, though.”

“Sargeant Littlebottom says he’s been messing around with something called ‘dark light’,” Nick said warningly. “Not entirely sure I grasp what it is, but she seems to think it’s pretty dangerous stuff.”

Flavours paused in the middle of nibbling his pulled pork. “It is. The educated rodents don’t typically go that deep, but you… hear things.”

Nick nodded towards his partner, then looked over at Piper. “You be careful around that stuff, hear?”

Piper sighed, exasperated. “Nick, I know how to take care of myself!”

Nick lifted his hands, palms out, in the universal, ‘Look, that wasn’t an attack, I’m unarmed’ gesture. “Believe me, I know, but we’re _all_ still getting used to all this magic and mystic stuff.”

“Nick, what’s it like to have a talking rat for a partner?” Nat asked, watching as Flavours took another sip from his thimble.

“Hey-” Nick started to protest at the same time Artificial Flavours put his nose in the air. “Excuse me, Miss Nat, but my name is ‘Flavours’. Besides, you might as well ask _me_ what it’s like to have a synthetic man as a partner! Corporal Valentine is more unusual than I am, you know!”

Nick chuckled wryly and gestured towards the rat. “You know, he’s right.”

Nat laughed and asked, “Okay, then. Sorry about that, Mister Flavours.”

“Just Flavours, please.”

“Oh. Flavours,” Nat corrected. “Well then. What’s it like to have a synthetic man for a partner?”

“Oh, I like it. Nick never talks down to me - except, you know, literally, because I’m smaller than he is - he’s very observant, he’s taught me quite a lot about the Watch clacks codes, and his shoulder is warmer than a human’s.”

Nick chuckled at the rat’s description of him. “Well, I guess he’s got his priorities in order.”

Nat giggled while Deacon stuffed some brisket into his mouth. As soon as he had chewed it down enough that he could talk, he said, “So how come Garvey doesn’t ever just use the clacks, anyway?”

“Well he’s usually at sites still being built,” Piper explained. “No clacks tower yet to do the sending.”

“Besides, clacks are pretty expensive,” Nick observed. “Good for quick updates, not so good for your letters-home type messages.”

“Good point,” Deacon admitted. “I think I remember hearing they changed their price system, too. Charging by the character instead of the word.”

“I’m guessing they had to after the Morporkians figured out camel case,” Nick pointed out, amused, before taking a sip of his drink. “They’ve got a lot of work to do on their encryption schemes, but I have to admit, for a pre-electrical society, they’ve gotten pretty good with some of their clacks data compression. If they ever manage electricity and mix it up with everything else they’ve got going on, things’re going to get pretty interesting pretty quickly.”

“They aren’t already?” Piper laughed. “You know that from what I’m hearing around the office, these people went from having no concept of what a newspaper even was to having a widely circulated paper getting clacksed out to the rest of the continent and _color photographs_ inside of a month. I’ve checked the Times’ archives, you can tell with each of their early issues when some sudden leap was happening in their printing tech.”

“So does anyone else think it’s… kind of weird that these guys made up some sort of game that was filled with all sorts of technology that they don’t even know about?” Nat asked.

Nick shrugged. “I don’t know, was it weird that we had a bunch of pulp sci-fi that did the same thing? In a lot of cases, it wouldn’t even be about making up something entirely new, it’d be about imagining how you’d do the same things they’re already doing, but without magic. There’s a reason Sam kept calling robots ‘golems’: the idea of artificial workers and people wasn’t new to him, just the way it was done.”

“And I guess if you look at it right, atomic power can look a little like… well, magic,” mused Piper absently.

Nick finished a sip and set down his mug. “A lot like it, sometimes. Not too long ago this world’s only mainframe was part of an experiment to split the thaum, the smallest unit of magic. A few years later, he helps create a simulated world where they split the smallest unit of matter and filled it with, among other things, thinking machines.” He shrugged. “There’s a line you can follow, if you look at it right.”

Nat paused in the process of offering some beans to the Artificial Flavours and looked up at Nick. “You don’t think it could happen here, do you? The war, I mean.”

Nick sighed and ran his finger around the rim of his mug. “I think it already did, kiddo. They called them the Mage Wars. A couple thousand years ago, a bunch of Wizards and Sourcerers damn near blew this world to hell. They twisted the landscape and left the place littered with high magic zones that twisted the plants and animals that had managed to survive the initial blast. Some of those places are still around today.” He looked over at Nat. “Any of that sound familiar?” She nodded glumly, and Nick continued, “The biggest difference might not be what the war was fought with, but how long they’ve had to recover. They’ve had a couple millenia to recover. Us? Just a couple centuries.”

“Then… do you think it could happen again?” the girl asked nervously.

This time, Flavours answered, tone now more subdued than it had been previously. “Well, the whole University structure is supposed to help prevent that. Keep them soft and distracted with an easy life and big dinners, keep them together because you’re less likely to use a fireball to settle an argument when you’re in the blast radius. But… even with that, twenty years ago or so, I think, I heard they almost got restarted. And they’re still pretty arrogant and reckless with some of their magic. I’m living proof of that!”

“Don’t you like being able to talk, Artificial Flavours?”

“Oh, I love being able to talk!”

“Clearly,” muttered Nick dryly.

Flavours darted a glance towards him, but continued, “As I was _saying_ , I love being able to talk, don’t get me wrong, but those magic waste spills do a lot more than give some rats words and thoughts, and more of it seems not good than good. I can be happy that I got made what I am, but still think the way it was done and the people that done it were in the wrong. I’m not praising some wizard just because one of his dangerous experiments had one positive _unintended_ side effect.”

Piper stared at the rat, then up at Nick Valentine, then back down at Artificial Flavours. “Gee, Nick, I think I’m starting to understand why you seem to get along so well with your new partner.”

Nick barked a laugh as he picked his drink back up. “Yeah, I have to admit, I never expected I’d have so much in common with a talking rat.”

Flavours peered up at Nick. “I always had the impression that before they dropped me off on your desk, you never expected to meet a talking rat.”

“Also true,” admitted the synth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: Nick Valentine is a 1337 hax0r. Figuring out the Clacks was not hard for him.
> 
> Art for this chapter is by [JerkyVulture on Tumblr](https://jerkyvulture.tumblr.com/tagged/commission), and is very much appreciated.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	9. Pitchblende * Money Speaks for Money/The Devil For His Own * Unfocused Groups

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [There Is Power In A Union](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwbzxemJZIc&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=14) by Billy Bragg and [Take Me Home, Country Roads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRPeYP6gS-s&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=15) from the Fallout 76 Soundtrack.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Pitchblende * Money Speaks for Money/The Devil For His Own * Unfocused Groups_

Valentine was wrapping up his shift at the Watch House, when he noticed a man talking to Captain Carrot. Carrot and the man had actually been talking for some time, Valentine thought; he just hadn’t noticed them. The man wasn’t a Watchman; he was dressed in an ordinary enough fashion for the upper side of the lower classes. Something about him seemed familiar, though, maybe the resonance of his voice or his posture. Valentine watched him some time longer, trying to figure out where he’d seen him before, because he didn’t know the face, but something about the way he moved and spoke was definitely pinging bells. He was wearing round-lense sunglasses indoors, but he didn’t seem to be a vampire.

As it was, when the man was done with talking to Carrot, he came to Valentine, and he said, “Hey, we're going exploring tunnels, because Whispers is being a loser right now and won't go with me today. Dude said he has to spend time with his wife and kids. Said I could come back later and we could play cards.”

Valentine tilted his head to one side as a few things clicked into place. “...Deacon?”

“Something like that,” said Deacon, shrugging. His sunglasses were different. He looked ever so slightly bewildered in the aftermath of his conversation with Carrot.

“New face,” Valentine observed. Igorinas could work plastic surgery miracles.

Deacon sat down next to Valentine and put his feet up on Nick’s desk. “Yeah, well, I was starting to feel like I'd been in that face for too long, and then I realized that technically, that was the only face I've ever had, so definitely time for a change.”

Valentine nodded sympathetically. Being a former fictional character presented many unusual challenges in life. He tried to think about why Deacon would have been talking to Carrot. "Still trying to break into the Watch House, Deacon?"

"Gods! Whispers is _really_ good with the traps, isn't he? We should have put him to use fixing up security at the Railroad!" said Deacon, which wasn’t an answer.

Nick observed, "He'd have made you change your password to something other than 'railroad'." 

Deacon cringed. "I _really_ like to hope that was one of those things put in because it was supposed to be a game, and if we were real, we would have come up with something better. Also, maybe... not so much with the line leading through half the city and straight to our door? But hey, it’s not like the literacy rate in the Commonwealth was any better than it is here."

Valentine sighed and gave up, because Deacon had by that point successfully derailed the conversation away from whether or not he was trying to break into the Yard. Deacon had looked a bit lost, though, walking away from Carrot, and Valentine decided to pry. “So what were you talking to the Captain about?”

Deacon reluctantly admitted, “I... agreed to help him with the Scouts? Why did I agree to that?" 

Valentine smirked. "Yeah. He does that to people." 

The Ankh-Morpork Scouting and Urban Survival Federation was an initiative mainly aimed at preventing bored youths from engaging in crime. Carrot had already talked Valentine into doing a monthly one hour session on situational awareness and escape routes.

Deacon said, annoyed, “I had already noticed that Captain Carrot does that to people, and I thought I was prepared, and he did it to me anyway!”

Valentine smirked wider.

Deacon shook himself out. “Anyway. You. Me. Sewers. Maybe swing by Whispers’s place for a card game later.”

“Sounds swell,” said Valentine, only half-sarcastically.

The Patrician had multiple teams, mainly mixes of dwarfs and goblins, out surveying the underground for his Undertaking. The dwarf community already had a head-start on mapping the Undercity. Deacon had copies of most of these maps already, and he deliberately targeted uncharted areas for his walk with Valentine.

The synth asked Deacon what he’d been up to, aside from, clearly, familiarizing himself with the Underground, and Deacon said expansively, "Yeah, I've joined some Guilds. Dues and benefits are kind of uneven. The Thieves' Guild is pretty sweet, I get to break into people's houses and feed their cats, but man, the Musicians' Guild is a rip-off."

“Wait, what?” said Valentine. They had come to a four-way fork in the tunnels.

“It’s pretty much paid cat-sitting,” Deacon said, shrugging, and they went right. “Dunno why the Thieves’ Guild does it. Turf rules for Guilds are weird.”

They went down levels. The architecture changed as they went, almost resembling something Nick would have called Roman. Ancient graffiti marked the walls. Vimes read a little Latatian, Valentine knew, but he hadn’t picked up much yet himself. He wondered what it said.

Probably, ‘Mine’s bigger.’17

The sewers contained far less sewage than one would expect of a city with Ankh-Morpork’s smell. King Harry’s men were remarkably efficient in carrying away urine and feces. They didn’t want to let all that gold go down the drain. Besides, the sewer system was nonfunctional and hadn’t been connected to the city proper for centuries. There was still indeterminate sludge on the ground but only an inch or so of it in most places.

Some animals and fungi lived down here, but the only plants were some scummy green algae that huddled around the wan glow of mushrooms that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Nucleus. In fact, the mushrooms made Valentine frown thoughtfully and collect a sample.

“If you brew those up with ash blossom, gourd blossom, melon blossom, water, and wheat, you get a herbal stimulant that makes you wonder why you went to all that trouble instead of going to the corner shop for tea,” said Deacon.

“Seriously, Deacon, we’ve been seeing other elements from the _Aftermath_ icono-game showing up in Ankh-Morpork, and I can’t tell if these are just the normal glowing mushrooms you get in a magic city or if this is the kind of Commonwealth mushroom that thrives in humid and radioactive locations, like on the walls of underground caves, or around pools of irradiated water,” said Valentine, pocketing the mushroom sample.

“Are you saying I ought to be packing RadAway?” Deacon asked lightly.

“Probably. Turns out, troll drugs are mostly laced with radium, and that’s got me worried about what they do with all the uranium - only, they call it uselessium - that’s a byproduct of extracting radium out of pitchblende,” said Valentine, rubbing his wrists nervously.

“Isn’t that a comforting thought,” muttered Deacon direly, “What’s your geiger counter saying?”

“If you gotta know, it’s screeching incomprehensibly all the time, because I got punched in it, and Igorina hasn’t been able to calibrate it yet,” said Valentine.

“Ouch,” said Deacon.

They ran away from the obligatory albino Genuan chameleon alligators only to run into a pack of rats toting a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Valentine and Deacon looked to each other, nodded, and went off the other way.

They’d been exploring for about two hours when Deacon declared, “The Whispers juniors will be getting into bed soon, so let’s freshen up at Casa del Deacon and go drop in on him.”

“Does he actually for sure know you’re coming?” asked Valentine dubiously.

“No, but that’s what makes it fun,” Deacon said cheerily.

“And you’re gonna show me where you live? I’m touched,” added Valentine.

“One of the places,” Deacon said, shrugging.

Along the way there, five stories down in the Undercity, Deacon warned, “We’re close to Unseen University now. That’s how I lost my old sunglasses, y’know. They turned into a chicken and tried to peck out my eyes.” He picked up a rock and threw it down a long corridor, watching it closely. On the tenth bounce, the rock turned into a mouse and scuttled away. “Hmm. Magic front’s getting a bit closer. I’ll have to watch that.”

Valentine stared. He couldn’t tell if Deacon was being serious about his sunglasses; he might have just changed them out for a different pair because aviator sunglasses stood out in Ankh-Morpork, but seeing raw, casual magic still threw the synth for a loop.

They moved along another series of twists, turns, ups, and downs. Deacon lived in an abandoned temple with architecture that looked pre-Ankhian, with perhaps even some ancient Djelibeybian influences. Deacon unlocked the front door and directed, “Wipe your boots.”

Deacon had a boar-bristle mat, which did an efficient job of wiping the mud off their boots, but Valentine noticed that, as soon as they stepped through the threshold, Deacon’s appearance changed entirely. Valentine raised what would have been an eyebrow, if he had any hair.

Inside, the temple was illuminated with more glowing mushrooms and decorated in what Valentine would call ‘eclectic scavenger chic’. A large, padded, corrosion-proofed pen full of toys contained a swamp dragon, which perked up the moment Deacon returned. A symbol from a faith Valentine didn’t recognize dominated the far wall of the temple, and beneath it was a small shrine. Mud cleaned from his boots, Deacon paced to the shrine and lit a black candle that cast flickering shadows, which endarkened rather than illuminated. Then he picked up the swamp dragon out of its pen and cuddled it up against his chest. 

“Y’know, living in the temple of a forgotten god seems to be inviting a certain amount of… screaming tentacle death,” Valentine said cynically. The gods were not, of course, gods, but they were beings with powers beyond any wizard, and Valentine had already seen what became of the more militant atheists, the type who liked to climb the Temple of Small Gods during thunderstorms.

“She’s not forgotten.18 She just doesn’t like her name to be spoken,” Deacon said quietly. He opened up a cabinet and pulled out two bottles of Winkles, offering one to Valentine.

Valentine took it gratefully. “Thanks. Cheers. Here’s to…”

“Peace, love, justice, and the American way,” Deacon deadpanned.

They clinked their beers, and they drank. Deacon fed his empty bottle to the swamp dragon.

“Y’seen anything from the icono-game turn up?” asked Valentine, eventually.

Deacon rummaged through his cabinet and pulled out three vials with a syringe and said, “Grade A psycho.”

“Damn,” Valentine cursed. The Watch had known some different drugs were showing up on the streets, these days. The Patrician generally didn’t care, but psycho was causing problems the same way that troll drugs caused problems.

“I’ve seen some mole rats around here, too, and...” Deacon rummaged some more, and he pulled out a piece of armor marked with the symbol of the Brotherhood of Steel.

Valentine grimaced. “Look, ah, when you see these things, if you wouldn’t mind telling me -”

“What makes you think that I’m not already telling Whispers?” Deacon said, putting Fluffy the swamp dragon back in its pen.

“You might be, but Sam and I don’t exactly share everything,” said Valentine.

“And the great detective wants to figure it out on his own?” Deacon asked.

“No, I just… wish we shared,” Valentine admitted, shuttering his optics.

Deacon clapped a hand on Valentine’s shoulder. He blew out the candle. He showed Valentine where a nearby door opened into a deep well shaft, and they scrambled up the rope and climbed out in street-level Ankh-Morpork, not far at all from Unseen University.

Then they dropped in on Vimes, who looked, as he often did, guilty when he saw Valentine, like he wanted him and felt like a reprobate for wanting him, but he didn’t look surprised. Vimes observed, “Deacon. You brought Nick. Hello there, Nick. Up for a game of cards?”

“Sure, sure,” said Valentine, following Vimes. “Deacon tell you about the psycho and the mole rats and the Brotherhood of Steel armor?”

“Actually, Deacon told me about the Brotherhood of Steel _paladin_ ,” said Vimes, his voice stressed, “but I suppose armour would be what’s left now. So. Cripple Mr. Onion, eights wild?”

17 [Bawdy Graffiti is a grand tradition.](https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu)

18 [Not all gods and goddesses like their names spoken.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPXmO46OQoU&list=PL33199E7B5359D014&index=22)

* * *

This week Constable Valentine’s beat was in the Scours. It was actually one of the aspects of the Ankh-Morpork Watch that he liked: sure, there were specialists, but everyone walked patrols, at least two a week even if they were desk jockey specialists like Pessimal. The beats were rotated so that every Watchman got to know the whole city. Technically, Watchmen didn’t have permanent patrol partners, either, but it was pretty common to be assigned a temporary partner during their training period, such as when Valentine had been assigned to Anvilfoot, or Artificial Flavours to Valentine. By that point, both the rat and the synth were often assigned to work with other Watchmen, but they were still paired together regularly. 

Valentine was walking along Clay Lane, heading from the Pitts to Quarry Lane, with Artificial Flavours riding on his shoulder as he often did, when he felt his foot nudge something that didn’t feel like the normal debris of the streets of Ankh-Morpork. 

“What’s th- wait a minute,” Nick murmured as he crouched down to examine what looked like a piece of plastic. In fact, to Valentine's surprise and unease, it looked like part of a Generation 2 synth’s face. 

Flavours scrambled down Valentine’s arm and sniffed at it, then nibbled lightly, causing Nick to make a face. He observed, “This smells a bit like you, Nick.”

“Well, I’m not letting you have a comparison taste,” Valentine grumbled as he looked around the edge of the street. Closer to a break between two buildings, he spotted what looked like… oh God. Yeah. That was a hand. A Generation 2 synth hand. 

“Another… ‘incursion’, I guess?” Flavours asked, but then he moved his ears to a more upright position and looked down the narrow alley they were next to, his fur bristling.

A Generation 2 synth, one of the standard models in an Institute jumper, burst out of the alley. 

“Hey!” shouted both Nick and Flavours, and Nick was about to give chase when he heard a grating voice, like stone against stone, say, “Look, Hardcore, dere another one.”

Valentine spun back towards the alley, optics widened in alarm. Three large trolls were emerging from the alley, the first at a plodding run, the second at a brisk walk. The third was dragging a badly damaged synth that was missing most of its face. In its weird, mechanical voice, it protested, “I am the victim of vi-” and then the troll dragging it ripped its head off. 

“Grab it,” the troll holding the synth ordered, before biting down on the head in its hand. “Dese fings pretty good.”

Valentine had never in his life wished he was able to vomit so much as he did right then, but there was no time to focus on that. He took off running in the opposite direction from the other Gen 2 synth, hoping to perhaps buy it time, and pulled out his bell, ringing it desperately as his processors pulled up the path to the nearest Watch station. There was just no way he was taking on three large trolls with a crossbow, truncheon, and rat, even if that rat was a remarkably effective dirty fighter.

“Huh,” Artificial Flavours observed, clinging to Nick’s shoulder. “Y’know, they say trolls used to try and eat people but it didn’t work because they couldn’t digest them. They eat rocks and metal and stuff – guess that explains why those poor buggers would taste good to them.”

“Yes, thank you, Flavours, that is exactly what I want to be thinking about right now!” Valentine shouted. Then he spotted a familiar figure and ran full-tilt towards it.

Fortunately, these trolls seemed unexpectedly sluggish for trolls in the dead of winter, the time when their silicon brains were normally working at maximum efficiency. Valentine suspected they were on one or more of the troll drugs. Certainly, this would explain why the fastest of the three didn’t notice the super mutant until Strong slammed his sledgehammer into the side of the troll’s head, just as it probably explained why it only took one hit to knock the guy down. 

“Thanks, Strong,” Valentine paused long enough to say, “but they’ve still got us out-gunned. We can’t just fight them all here.”

Strong grunted, turned, and started running alongside Nick. “Strong understand retreat, robot man. Warned you and Mister Vimes to get out of tower before brothers arrived, didn’t Strong?” 

They passed a side road and Strong grabbed Valentine’s shoulder, redirecting him down it. “We go down Milestones.”

“What? Why?” Nick asked, although he didn’t slow his pace.

“Because Lance-Corporal Chert live on Milestones!” Strong explained, pointing towards the troll in question. 

Chert looked up in confusion at the fast-approaching Watchmen and their pursuers, but his addition to the equation changed the whole balance. He braced himself as Valentine, Flavours, and Strong ran just past him and clotheslined one of their drugged chasers with his large and stony arm. Nick moved to the side and tripped the final one as he ran past, letting Strong slam it in the back of the head with the sledgehammer as it hit the ground.

Chert looked at the two fallen trolls and turned towards Strong with annoyance. “I was off-duty, Strong,” he complained.

Strong shrugged unsympathetically and put his culturally-appropriate-weapon in its place across his back. “Strong off-duty when robot man and rat come by and make Strong on-duty. Super mutants share with brothers, so Strong come share duty with brother-Watchman Chert.”

Flavours snorted with amusement and Valentine even chuckled. “Was that a joke, Strong?”

“Strong make jokes!” Strong protested. “Robot man just stare-typing.”

“Eh, sorry, I’ll go report myself for cultural insensitivity later,” Nick responded.

Chert kicked one of the two fallen trolls with his foot. “Hey. Dese are Big Marble and Hardcore! And dey on something!”

Strong scratched his head. “They on list?”

“Yeah. Ol’ Sarge Detritus been wanting to bag Hardcore for ages,” Chert explained.

Strong nodded and explained, “Robot man find them. Robot man good at finding.”

This wasn’t exactly how Nick would have preferred to bag a major perp, but he’d take it. “There was another one back on Clay, but we’ll need to check out the alley where I found them, too. Seems they had some Generation 2 synths – those, erm, are what I am, only more primitive models – and were eating them. Another synth took off down the road, but in the chaos, I didn’t get to see where he got to.”

Strong glowered. “That bad. Strong not supposed to eat people, so they shouldn’t eat people.”

“Well, I’m glad we agree on that,” Valentine replied dryly.

Then the super-mutant looked at Nick and his passenger. “Rat okay to eat sometimes, not other times. Strong still not sure when rat is people and when rat is food.”

Artificial Flavours replied with a breezy shrug. “I recommend asking first, Lance-Constable.”

Chert rubbed his head. “So we got three known pushers high on dey own supply, and now dey been eating peoples, and also dere been another ding where stuff from dat game is getting out.” He looked at the others and sighed the sigh of someone who just realized that they were the senior Watchman present in a ridiculous situation. “I fink we all gonna be on duty here for a while.”

* * *

Wathen had to ask thrice for DiMA to bite the spinning wheel. He couldn’t say DiMA’s name correctly. He’d said Deimos, like _dread_ , as in the brother of Phobos, _fear_ , and his ‘fluence didn’t seem to work if he had the wrong name. Wathen switched to a different sort of command that seemed to be able to run off ‘you there, slacker’, and DiMA could vaguely tell that considerably more magical expenditure had gone into the non-targeted spell versus the targeted spell.

DiMA still had trouble seeing magic. It was a sort of blurry blackness to him or maybe something like the feeling of 1000 rads or the sound of silence after a bell had tolled. Chatur, in an unexpectedly poetical mood or possibly just due to severe dehydration, waxed that octarine was the king of colours. Alf told DiMA dismissively that octarine was just yellow-green-purple. Whatever it was, DiMA had to squint very hard to get any kind of focus on it. Xian thought that DiMA might need glasses, although octiron-glass was extremely expensive. Zinon merely stroked his beard and looked philosophical. He did that a lot. It meant he had no idea and didn’t want to admit it. Hex, who saw the colour of magic with a bespoke gnome-crafted optic, supplied DiMA with the exact wavelength region he was supposed to be seeing, and it seemed DiMA was picking it up; his processors just weren’t interpreting it properly.

In any case, even with his blurry, unfocused, off-colour sight, DiMA had seen that it had taken Wathen a few tries and a few _different_ spells to ‘fluence him to bite the spinning wheel. Some of that was just Wathen getting his name wrong and possibly some of it was to do with the fact that Wathen didn’t really seem to be able to tell DiMA and Zinon apart and, indeed, didn’t seem to be able to tell DiMA wasn’t human, but DiMA didn’t know what the rest of it meant.

On the second day of no sleep, the graduate students seemed sort of drunk. DiMA had often seen them drunk, even rascally drunk, but he’d usually seen them drunk _and_ caffeinated. That was, Chatur would say, a Klatchian tradition of alternating orakh (fermented cacti sap and scorpion venom) with Klatchian coffee, which took one straight past sober and into knurd, the state of anti-drunkenness. It was Cultural for him. He didn’t know what everyone else’s excuses were. The drunkenness induced by a lack of sleep was a sort of joyless drunkenness, though. It made them slower at their compile attempts on the imps.

On the fourth day of no sleep, DiMA had noticed focus problems among the graduate student wizards. He didn’t have the external perspective to be able to tell if he himself was having focus problems, but he knew that he wasn’t able to complete his diagnostics, even if he tried to trigger them manually, which was going to lead to increased processing time, lag, and fragmentation. For that matter, he also couldn’t run defragmentation cycles anymore. DiMA projected that in perhaps nineteen days without a defragmentation cycle, he was going to have a memory overflow error, and all of his processes would hang.

He didn’t much like that thought. He should have run when Wathen started throwing ‘fluences around, he supposed, but he’d been just so befuddled that Wathen couldn’t tell DiMA and Zinon apart.

Meanwhile, Alf broke down crying that they were having to gut all of the plot and the non-player characters from the game, weeping openly over Curie’s beauty, as Chatur went _‘erm_ ’ and shuffled away, hiding the printouts of Cait.

Zinon announced that they couldn’t get the imps to compile, but they could get them to compost, and several of them had absconded to work for Modo, the dwarf gardener of Unseen University.

On the sixth day, the graduate student wizards became snappish and moody, as opposed to merely argumentative and obstinate. Xian forgot what he was chanting, in mid-chant, repeatedly, and had to keep looking at his written notes. Then he forgot to look at his notes. As a result, they had a batch of dozen imps that they couldn’t use, because they all recalled half of the lines. They did teach them to compote, though, and sent them off to the Kitchen.

Then Xian summoned a little stormcloud inside the building, and when asked about it, he couldn’t remember why and blamed Zinon.

Wathen approved of this, though he said the rain was much cheaper than the good, old-fashioned rain they had in Llamedos.

All their notes were soggy. DiMA had to consult the Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map Folding to find the Professor of Cryptogamy, a rather rather small, blameless wizard, who specialized in the study of algae and who was very, very good with delicate, waterlogged specimens.

On day seven plus one or 7a, which was more economical to say it, of no sleep, Zinon collapsed. He was awake. They were all awake. They were always awake. But Zinon couldn’t sit up anymore, and he had started vividly hallucinating that he was Professor Bengo Macarona, the famous football star.19

Chatur suggested that they ought to take Zinon to the Unseen University sanitorium, where some of the small Faculty of Medicine at the University could have a look at him. Alf said, “Sod that, we want Zinon to live… I think, anyway. We need to take him to… wossname… the Lady Syb.”

“We have to take him to Commander Vimes’s wife? He’s not a sick dragon,” DiMA said, puzzled. He felt terribly slow. Maybe the logic was obvious here, and he was missing it.

“No, no, itsa… itsa… building,” said Alf. “S’got Igors. And hygiene.”

“You can have both?” asked Chatur, blinking slowly.

Alf whispered loudly, “S’got both.”

Alf sort of knew how to get to the Lady Syb. DiMA did not, but he had a map, although he lagged terribly as he tried to make sense of it. So the two of them staggered off with Zinon. It took Alf nine tries to cast the ritual to summon a small floating disk to carry Zinon, having variously summoned instead: dice, a dime, a dial, a dish, some dip, which he inadvisably gobbled down, a diary, which Xian took away to read, a diode, which DiMA claimed for his own purposes, a dinghy, and a diptych finely engraved with cavorting rats. The actual floating disk that he summoned was about big enough to lift a coffee mug. At that point, DiMA just picked Zinon up in his arms, and they wandered out through the Scholar’s Way, where bricks in the wall had been removed and replaced for millenia. They made it through Sator Square, the Cham, and the Plaza of the Broken Moons. DiMA thought they were doing so well when they walked onto the Street of the Small Gods.

Then they took a wrong turn onto Short Street and got lost on the Street of Cunning Artificers. Alf forgot why they were there, and DiMA wasn’t able to pull that information in time before they all ended up in the Counting House, a restaurant that had shockingly little to do with mathematics. Alf was halfway through shoving stew in Zinon’s general direction when DiMA’s processors finally finished their query, and he groggily reminded, “We were taking him to a hospital.”

“Hm. Might explain why he can’t swallow, wouldn’t it? S’pose I’ll jusht eat his share, too… safer that way,” concluded Alf.

So they staggered into the waiting room of the Lady Syb and sat down next to a man whose leg was rudely occupying the seat next to him. Across the room was a woman about to have kittens who was grumbling about how Bast never answered her letters anymore. Another man had an amusing collection of boils, which did tricks. He’d sprained the boil that did the suggestive gestures, though, and was terribly worried that it might not recover.

DiMA played with his card deck and got away with it for an hour before Alf noticed and said, “Don’t play with that in public. It’s embarrassing.”

It took a while for DiMA’s thoughts to catch up with the admonishment. It took longer for DiMA to conclude that wizards thrived on ignoring each other, because it was better than paying attention and throwing fireballs. He played solitaire against himself and managed to lose on both sides. DiMA felt he was letting machine culture down.

It was 7a hours before Zinon was seen by one of the young doctors in training, who warned that a bill would be sent to Unseen University. Alf snapped, “Oh, please do! Everyone knows that Mister Stibbons does the sums since the Bursar’s gone totally frog pills. Maybe he’ll finally come back!”

Mister Stibbons. Hmm. DiMA knew he was busy, but...

The resident listened to their somewhat redacted story, and she concluded, “Your Zinon’s got sleep deprivation, and so do you, mind. What’s keeping him from sleeping is one of your basic fairytale curses. Probably has to kiss his true love. I suppose that might present some difficulties for a wizard. I’m going to give him a litre of fluids and tell him to go home for a shower. It can only improve his chances.”

So they sat there, next to Zinon, as the hung bottle of fluids slowly gravity-dripped into his vein. Alf speculated hazily, “What if we put in dragons.”

“I do not think our flight scripting would support such an addition,” DiMA said pensively.

“What about wossname, drakes. Ain’t they dragons with no wings?” said Alf.

DiMA didn’t know.

They were, however, sighted by a zombie, who decided to wander over and introduce himself as, “Reg Shoe. You’re Nick Valentine’s brother, aren’t you? Valentine’s crazy. Got in the middle of a troll fight off duty.”

DiMA had to think about that. “...yes.” After a moment, he added, “I’m DiMA.”

“I’m Alf. Just Alf,” Alf said guardedly.

“I’m Bengo Macarona!” said Zinon.

“Hush you, no, you’re not,” said Alf, rapping Zinon about the ear. “He’s Zinon, and sorry, guv, he’s a bit Bursar right now.”

“You all look dead tired,” said Reg, and he added defensively, “I get to say that, ‘dead’ is a reclaimed word for me.”

“Uh? Yeah. Been up for 7a days straight…” said Alf.

“Why? Didn’t we fight, didn’t we bleed, for a third of the day for work, a third for sleep, and third for his own?” asked Reg, as if reciting a slogan.

“I... don’t think that actually happened?” said Alf, blinking owlishly. “Sounds nice, though... Though this isn’t actually work. ‘S classes. Sort of.”

Reg wasn’t going to let reality get in the way of a good slogan, and he asked, “And what have you been doing for days that isn’t work?”

“Trying to make an icono-game run on imps because some nob said so,” Alf said gloomily.

“Ah-hah! The upper classes trying to profit off the unpaid labour of the unwashed masses!” said Reg, and he sniffed, “Definitely unwashed. Might consider a shower.”

It was a pathetic thing when a zombie commented on someone’s smell.

“I smell like victory,” said Zinon, still labouring under the delusion of being a famous footballer.

“You ought to go on strike,” said Reg, just the same way that a village witch might suggest slapping a garlic poultice on anything.

“Can’t smack Mister Wathen. He’ll ‘fluence me,” Alf mumbled.

DiMA felt a bit cross-eyed, but something was filtering in. “Go… on?”

That was when the resident came in and scolded, “Reg! What did I say about zombies in here?”

“This is Vitalism! I’m here visiting poor, sick Fittly!” Reg protested.

“Fine, I’ll throw out Fittly, too,” said the resident physician.

19 [Effects of long periods of sleep deprivation.](https://web.archive.org/web/20071129232357/http://www.articlebrain.com/Article/Eleven-Days-Awake/412)

* * *

Valentine had seen on the clacks a rather large pitchblende shipment, which was concerning to him for his own reasons, insofar as pitchblende was a major source of uranium, which the Ankh-Morporkians called uselessium. Pitchblende was concerning to Sergeant Detritus for an entirely different reason: it contained traces of radium, and radium was a major component in many troll drugs. Troll drug cookeries processed through tons of pitchblende for its precious radium.

Valentine tried not to think too hard about how they were disposing of the leftover uselessium.

So when Valentine mentioned what he’d seen on the Clacks about a pitchblende shipment to Sergeant Detritus, he found himself dragged off on a stakeout at the docks. He’d spent five hours hiding under a tarp with Detritus. 

What he’d learned so far was that there really wasn’t much of a smell to trolls. They were just sort of rocky. Goblins? Goblins had a _distinct_ smell, and plenty of human Watchmen didn’t believe in baths. One of Vimes’s finer virtues was the man bathed. Maybe geologists could tell trolls apart by smell, yeah, the real rockhound types…

If his Geiger counter was only working, this would all have been a lot easier, Valentine thought. Many troll officers tested suspected drugs by sticking their fingers in them and licking them, and some of the more sensitive sorts would often then walk through walls. It wasn’t ideal. 

Eventually, a shadowy, hooded figure sidled up to the _Happy Entrance_ , the docked boat that Valentine and Detritus had been watching for five hours. The figure was trying to be inconspicuous, and it made them stand out like sore thumbs. Valentine could have been less noticeable, and he was a synthetic man in a society that hadn’t discovered plastic yet!

The hooded figure approached a smoking sailor lounging at the dock, and said, “The cock crows at midnight.” She sounded like a Morporkian human, although maybe she was a vampire or a werewolf or something like that. Valentine wasn’t good enough yet to tell them apart by voice.

“Sounds like a bit of dysfunction to me, yeah?” drawled the sailor.

“Look, we just want the sacred elements, okay?” snapped the hooded figure. “C’mere, I got the cash.” She held out a sack, which the sailor inspected.

“Uh huh, and I’m sure your ‘legitimate religious uses’ include getting all your troll buddies high. The Watch here cracks down on this stuff, you know? You - you’re not one of those Cable Street Particulars, are you?” asked the sailor, suspiciously.

“No. We are but simple believers. We wish only to bask in the Glow,” she said.

That gave Valentine pause.

The money changed hands, and the sailor opened up a crate and handed over a heavy wheeled trunk. The figures grabbed at the heavy wheeled trunk to cart it off. Detritus had clearly heard enough, and he jumped out to ambush her, Valentine flanking to the other side.

The hooded outfit, though, was a cheap tear-away, and when Detritus grabbed her, the woman broke and ran, abandoning the trunk. Without the hood, Valentine saw her clearly for a moment: her face was marked with black orbitals like drawings of atoms.

A Child of Atom.

Detritus turned on the sailor to question him, but the sailor insisted - it wasn’t illegal to sell pitchblende. Plenty of alchemists used it. That was a human he’d been selling to, anyway! No, he didn’t know her name…

There was a Child of Atom buying pitchblende in Ankh-Morpork. Vimes needed to know.

* * *

DiMA turned off the imp-tech projector and concluded, “...and that is why we would be benefited by banding together to form a graduate student union to further our interests and defend our rights.”

Zinon had gotten into the frog pills. He was hallucinating that he was sane. He pointed out, “You’re not a graduate student, DiMA. You’re a grader. You only get the one class a term comp’d.”

“True,” DiMA admitted, “but that is only because I cannot afford full graduate student tuition and do not qualify for any scholarships, not being the eighth son of an eighth son, not having worked any major work of magic, not being a legacy scholar, not having retrieved a major artifact, and not being a famous footballer.”

Chatur wasn’t doing too terribly with the sleep deprivation, but he’d quit the orahk without quitting the Klatchian coffee, his body temperature was running a fever pitch, and there was a tremor in his hands. He steepled his fingers and suggested, “You could try going back in time and convincing your parents to have more brothers before they have you, to make you an eighth son.”

DiMA felt a little dizzy, considering that. “...I was created by Hex. You were there, Chatur.” Was DiMA number eight of the male-identified entities created? He tried to count. No, that was probably Shaun...

“Ah-hah!” Chatur said, pointing smugly as if DiMA had conceded a major point. “Then you _are_ a legacy scholar. Mister Stibbons’s your grandfather!”

There was the sort of silence that sounded like the sight of octarine.

Eventually, DiMA said, “I suppose. I’m… not sure it works that way?” Mister Stibbons seemed sort of like an Institute scientist given two caveats, one, that magic was real, and two, that an ethics module had been included, which was a rather critical bug fix, insofar as DiMA was concerned. There were worse people to have in one’s lineage. “I’ll try submitting the legacy scholar application,” which would be read by Mister Stibbons, who now handled most of Unseen University’s finances, the Bursar being medically indisposed, “but that is irrelevant. We need to band together with the other graduate students -”

“Why? Those buggers over in the slood lab are having a jolly old time,” said Alf.

“And the ones down in Genua! Studying shellfish! They’re so, so… shellfish,” Xian said. A small stormcloud was now perpetually over his head. He couldn’t remember how to dispel it.

“I could go for being permanently sent around to Bugarup,” Zinon said.

“Dr. Hix’s students get to tie people’s shoelaces together,” Chatur sulked.

DiMA felt a little cross eyed. Why was human nature so hard? He didn’t remember it being this difficult. He read people, he got to know how they thought better than they did, and then he gave them some little nudges, and everyone was better off. “...if the students in the slood lab are having a better time than you are… and you band together… then you’ll be having a better time, and they’ll… be having a worse one.”

His compatriots appeared to actually consider that train of non-logic. DiMA felt depressed.

Chatur admitted, “A bold application of the law of averages. But what are we going to do, each get to tie 1/10th of a shoelace?”

Alf asked, “Yeah, what’s in it for them?”

DiMA turned the imp-tech projector back on and flipped back through his slides. “Collective bargaining rights will allow _all_ of us to negotiate a more equitable working and educational environment.”

“Oh, no, I’ve seen this. Workers’ rights are all fun and games until someone puts out an eye with a pitchfork and then Chairman Butterfly’s duly authorized representative takes your pig token away to scold you for your recklessness,” said Xian.

Zinon said shakily, “Actually… slaves in Ephebe have to be paid, must have three meals a day, one with named meat, get two weeks’ running away time…”

They all paused uncomfortably.

DiMA sighed, “We could at least start by writing up a list of grievances and suggested solutions.”

“I don’t have a sapient pearwood staff and Xian does and he’s really smug about it,” started Alf.

DiMA corrected, “I mean with the administration.”

“I don’t like that I have to write words on tests. I don’t see why they can’t be all math,” said Chatur.

“Gotta write down your name,” said Alf.

“I don’t see why I should have to,” Chatur sniffed.

DiMA held his head. His processors felt like he’d poured radioactive sludge over them. “Working hours. Clearly, the current working hours are unsustainable.”

“What if we went back in time to when we could sleep?” Xian suggested. Old wizards hardly did any magic at all. Young wizards would waste three days on a magic solution to a problem that could be solved by walking across the room.

DiMA sort of seized on that. “The capacity to sleep or equivalent activities as appropriate by species should be considered a fundamental right and should not be infringed upon in any way.”

Wathen was standing in the doorway. DiMA had no idea how long he’d been there. DiMA had started seeing the Mother of the Fog out of the corner of his optics occasionally. He wasn’t entirely sure what was real anymore.

Wathen said scornfully, “What a bunch of lack-a-day knaves. If you throw that rabble-rousing presentation away, I’ve got this half-eaten leftover pizza from the Faculty buffet for you all.”

DiMA had observed that sleep deprivation seemed to make humans hungrier. Not being able to run diagnostics or defragmentation cycles had started to do... _something_ to DiMA’s internal reactor. Hex had started calculating - strictly hypothetically, Hex assured DiMA - how to teleport DiMA thirty miles high over the Disc. Just in case.

The graduate student wizards fell on the pizza like a pack of blood-drunk sharks, and DiMA’s slides went out the nearest window.

“Not hungry, Deimos?” said Wathen.

“DiMA,” DiMA corrected, “and I don’t eat.”

Wathen looked puzzled a moment. “Not a vampire, are you, Deimos? I won’t be having with that.”

“Not a vampire,” DiMA agreed.

“If you're not going to eat, and in my day, we were glad of the stale bread thrown at us, you can get back to…” Wathen trailed off. He didn’t even know what the students wizards were doing. He just knew it wasn’t being done quickly enough.

DiMA said, “I shall busy myself reticulating the splines, then.”

* * *

“Hey, Commander, do you want good news or bad news?” asked Valentine.

“If it’s news, it’s bad,” said Vimes, who was at his desk.

“Well. It not troll drugs,” Detritus said.

“What’s not troll drugs?” Vimes asked.

“I heard about a pitchblende sale, Sarge there took me on a stakeout, and, uh… well, the buyer was a Child of Atom, sir,” said Valentine.

Vimes stood up, hands on his desk, knuckles white. It didn’t do much for his height. He snarled, “A Child of Atom? In my city? That’s almost as bad as the bloody Stranger!”

Valentine held up his sketch, which was more like a render. Vimes looked over the markings on her face, mouthing quietly to himself, “‘Upon Atom think; know his servants watch’. Damn it! Another incursion -”

“Uh, here’s the thing, sir. I don’t know that she’s an incursion. Her accent was Morporkian,” Nick said hesitantly.

“Ankhian, more like. Prolly from Dimwell,” added Detritus.

“You’re saying a Dimmer’s gone and joined the Cult of Atom?” Vimes paused. “No, they’d do that. Cults get popular, gods know why… but if there’s a Cult of Atom for her to have joined, there must have been some kind of incursion! We’ll have to keep our eyes open.”

* * *

Despite his slides going out the window, DiMA briefly convinced the graduate student wizards to come out on strike with him. He even convinced Dr. Hix’s students to come along. DiMA carefully didn’t ask if they considered the picket some of their quota of turpitude.

One of the picket signs read, ‘No More Community Theatre Pamphlets’.

‘We Can't Be Best Without Rest’

‘More runes, less running’ said another sign. DiMA didn’t know what that was about; the gym was used for magic practise, not actual physical education.

‘If We Don't Snooze You Lose’

One of Hix’s students had a sign that said, ‘The humanities20 make us human.’ He was sheepishly avoiding DiMA’s gaze.

‘Reasonably priced grimoires.’ 

‘If Mr. Feta21 doesn’t have to solve his last theorem, why should I have to?’

‘Fluency, not ‘fluences’

‘Work deserves a salary, not a grade’

The graduate students milled about, signs held aloft, and engaged in the time-honoured tradition of complaining. It was, in fact, so time-honoured a tradition that the Lobsters permitted it to continue. 

“You know the metaphor of Didactylos’s Cave?” said Zinon, bitterly.

“That if one were to chain men in a cave and show them only the shadows of objects, that the shadows would be their reality for them, the image of the entity as synecdoche for the thing itself?” said DiMA.

“No, I mean that it’s like we’re chained up in a cave, none of that other rubbish,” Zinon corrected.

Then it started to rain. Xian didn’t notice. The rain put out the presumably octarine trash fire that one of Hix’s students had started in a waste bin.

“You know… we’re outdoors. There’s sky,” said Chatur. “I don’t like this. We should go back indoors.”

So the strike ended.

20 Post-Mortem Communications was considered to be a fine arts department.

21 [Academic types are really into solving last theorems.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem)

* * *

“I’m given to understand that there’s some disgruntlement about you dodgers,” said Wathen. “I can’t imagine why. In my day, our instructors threw fireballs at us, and we were grateful for them, too. You could keep warm for a day if you got hit with a fireball, you could. Of course, there were also the tripwires and the trapdoors. Nonetheless, we’re going to form focus groups to air grievances. Chatur, come here.”

“Just the two of us?” Chatur said, worried. “That’s not really a focus group…”

“If it helps at all, it’s not really just the two of us,” said Wathen. “My opinion’s the only one that matters.”

Chatur came back from the ‘focus group’, packed his bags, and stated dully that he was going to go back home to raise goats… which was very strange, because no one in his family had ever done that. Both his father and mother and all his older brothers were mathematicians.

“Now then… Zinon, was it?” said Wathen.

“Yes,” said DiMA, and he quietly clamped his hand around Zinon’s mouth and stuffed him in the nearest closet. He followed Wathen into the other room, taking advantage of the wizard’s inability to tell a Generation 2 synth from an Ephebian.

He should have done something when Wathen called Chatur back. DiMA felt guilty about his inaction there. For that matter, he should have done something when Wathen pulled out that spinning wheel. But shouldn’t DiMA have have done something when Martin was forced out and/or voluntarily left the Children of Atom and was replaced by Tektus, who was a destabilizing force upon the island? Shouldn’t he, as Sam Vimes had pointed out, done something more to see to it that Acadia would have a defensible position in case of an invasion?

There were a lot of things DiMA should have done.

Maybe now he could prevent Zinon from done unto.

Some spells needed to be very specifically targeted. Some didn’t. 

“Zinon,” Wathen began, “you will stop complaining, and you will do your part in finishing this little indulgence for the Lady Rust, or you’ll go back to Ephebe and muck about with bottomfeeders until you die. You will, in fact, be a good little boy, Zinon.”

That wasn’t a targeted spell.

* * *

The new _Aftermath_ came out just in time for the holiday shopping crush. The game, which took the form of a gauntlet worn on the arm with a flattened imp powered chameleon alligator-hide screen, quickly sold out. Shoppers had fought each other over the game when it became clear that supplies were dwindling. Many people didn’t even want the game; they just didn’t want anyone else to have it.

There were promotional bags that came with some special editions, which were supposed to be made of finest spun fireproof asbestos, which in reality were merely cheap canvas. The dress-up masks weren’t like the original, high-quality Boffo promotional masks, with the nose slots for flowers to keep off the Pseudopolis plague. They were mere cheap rubber, like wearing a sonky on one’s face, without any of the contextual benefits of that arrangement, and fell apart at the touch of humanoid sweat.

The game had no non-player characters, something which greatly aggrieved the wizarding students. At least, they would have been aggrieved, if they had the energy.

Its saving grace was that no one in Ankh-Morpork had ever seen anything like it, so they didn’t know how it was supposed to work, which was good, because it didn’t. For the multi-player content, a different imp, not the flattened one, would run from one player to another with updates, which generally led to the receiving imp, indignant, ignoring everything that the other imp was saying.

“I’m saying, [Insert User Name Here] got the drop on [Insert User Name Here],” the first imp argued.

No one ever filled out their registration cards.

”Hmm. Nope. Don’t buy it,” said the second.

“[Insert User Name Here]’s literally strung [Insert User Name Here] up by an eavestrough!”

“I don’t have to believe that.”

When players wanted to buy different colour armour, the imps would demand payment, which they’d run straightaway to Lady Rust’s account at the Royal Bank. They’d demand this, even if the player themself had repainted the armour by slopping paint on the screen.

There was no end of bugs.

And bloodbugs appeared in the cattle district and bloatflies over the Cemetery of Small Gods and radroaches at the King’s Legs and even a radscorpion scuttling over the Ankh. The Watch dealt with these things. They didn’t tell the wizards.

No, what people complained to the wizards about was…

“You haven’t set a weight for sammie pins for Survival Mode,” Xian read blearily off a complaint slip. “What do sammie pins even weigh? A pound?”

“Sounds fine,” said Zinon. He would have said ‘sounds fine’ if Xian had suggested that sammie pins weighed the square root of negative one. He would have agreed even if Xian had said that sammie pins weighed the Agatean pictogram of an excited dog. For a wizard, even a student wizard, that level of agreeability was a sign that Zinon was seriously ill.

Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, seeing an opportunity as only he could, started selling ‘rum’ that went with the game, in a bottle that looked absolutely nothing like a bomb. It was certainly a spirit. Almost definitely. Imbibing it made playing _Aftermath_ more enjoyable because then instead of dealing with all the glitches, one was horizontal on the floor. When one woke up, someone would have stolen the game off of one’s arm, and one wouldn’t have to deal with the game anymore.

For an extra fee, one could buy a private world which meant that one’s imp would only harass the imps of one’s friends, instead of harassing the imps of all and sundry. Players started buying private worlds for their enemies, because when one’s imp solely harassed one’s friends, they didn’t stay friends long.

Through it all, Lady Rust smiled, as she navigated her character to the first settlement that she could find and blew it up. Then she did it again. And again. There was a glitched room she’d found, which contained absolutely everything in the game. With that much access to rare items, she’d thoroughly destabilized the game’s internal economy, undercutting the grinders and miners and fishers and farmers. Any time some player thought they had a lock on an item, she’d be there, undercutting them until they gave up, and then she’d multiply the price a hundredfold.

Then, in desperation, they’d go to the in-game store and spend their golem-backed dollars, which went right to her bank account.

* * *

Old Longfellow, an inadvertent stowaway on a transoceanic voyage, found himself promptly dumped out on the docks of Bugarup. The weather was oppressively hot. He somehow doubted that the folks here took caps, which was a pickle, because he could use a drink.

The old hunter wandered the town a bit. It didn’t lack for bars, but most of them served canned beer. He was able to bum some off other people, against their better judgement. It was light, thin, fizzy, and cold. Longfellow distrusted it immensely.

He couldn’t say how many bars or days later it was when a grinning face said, “You look like a man who could do some cart driving.”

* * *

Strong, still in his Watch uniform, entered through the Curry Garden doors which were, somewhat surprisingly, large enough. He looked around and then stomped towards the table where several others of the Commander's former companions sat.

Deacon, who had found a more local style of sunglasses to go with his more Ankh-Morporkian style of clothes and his new face, laughed and greeted, "Hey! He made it! So, big guy, still searching for the milk of human kindness?"

Strong looked around at the chairs which, unlike the doors, were not large enough to accommodate him, so he just sat on the floor next to the table. "No. Think maybe that was metty-four."

Deacon just burst out laughing while Piper almost spit out her drink and Nick's own optics widened in surprise. "Wait! You **know** what a metaphor is?!" Piper exclaimed, shocked.

Strong nodded his head. "Yes. It mean 'lie'."

Nick struggled to keep from laughing out loud, but Deacon, Piper, and Nat didn't even bother trying. Strong looked around at the others in confusion. "What so funny?"

Deacon stood up. "I'm going to let you guys field this one, I've got something to take care of real quick. I'll be back in a moment." With that he moved off.

"Wait - " Piper protested as the former spy abandoned her to explain metaphors to a super mutant. "Gah!" she grunted in frustration as her protests had no effect. Then she looked back at Strong and sighed. "Okay, so... a metaphor isn't... it's not really a 'lie', exactly, it's just... it's like a way to make one idea clearer by comparing it to something else." While Piper attempted to explain language constructs, Nick started watching something over Nat's head with interest. 

Strong scratched his head. "Not seem very clearer to me. Sound like lie."

A waitress approached and gave the group a rather nervous look. "Uhm... your order will be up soon, but does your... new friend want anything?"

Nick looked between the waitress and the super mutant and suggested, hesitantly, "Three orders of curry-with-meat?"

Strong grunted and held up a hand, fingers splayed. "This many."

"Five orders of curry-with-meat?" Nick shrugged. 

"All right, we'll... uhm... we'll be right out with that. And perhaps a... crate to sit on?" she offered. 

Strong, from his place on the floor, nodded. "Crate good."

The waitress scurried off, and Strong grumbled, "Liked Harga's better. All-you-can-gobble. Why we not go there?"

"Because Harga banned you from the place after you almost ate him out of a restaurant last time," Nick pointed out dryly.

"How do you even afford enough for your appetite on a Watchman's salary, Strong?" Piper asked.

Strong shrugged. "Live in troll part of town. Rent cheap. Don't need special clothes. Got u-knee-form. Don't buy stupid drink that make humans stupid. Also buy whole animal from slaughter disk-tek. No cutting so is cheaper. Just hang it up for couple of days. Taste better."

"Don't your neighbors get upset when you're... hanging whole animals up where you live?"

Strong shook his head. "They not care, they trolls. Not care about hanging up meat. City trolls know meat not good for them, except maybe bone. Sometimes Strong give neighbors bones. They like bones. Like crunch."

Nat choked down a laugh while Piper asked, "So... Strong, if you... uhm, if you know there's no 'milk of human kindness', why do you stick around? I thought that was the only reason you wanted to travel with Bl- Commander Vimes to begin with?"

"Was, but then Strong learn, Vimes-human good leader. Come here, Vimes-human still good leader. Is strong leader to other humans and also strong leader to not-humans. Many not-humans think Vimes-human good leader, like trolls. Trolls strong, too, like super mutants. No super mutants here, but trolls here, and good leader is here. Vimes-human is Watch-leader, so Strong join Watch, make friends with strong trolls. But Watch say Watch help everyones. Not just human help human and troll help troll. Morpork all mixed up. Like alloy, strongest of metals." Strong gave a single, sharp nod. "That metty-four."

Piper and Nat both stared, dumb-struck, at the super mutant while Nick, who had, strangely, gotten used to working with him, grinned. The moment was interrupted as Deacon returned to the table and slipped back into his seat, followed not long after by a server with food for everyone except the late-arriving super-mutant and a crate to serve as Strong's seat. 

"Oh, nice, looks like I got back just in time!" Deacon said, pleased, as he dug into his own dish, ‘curry-with-named-meat’.

"What was that all about, anyway?" Piper asked.

"Oh, you know, call of nature, that sort of thing."

"Mm-hmm," replied Nick, who had only ordered a glass of gudamaba22. "And I'm sure this place's new delivery golem had nothing to do with it."

Deacon sighed, gave Piper and Nat a sideways glance, and then shrugged. "Hey, someone has to make sure the places that hire Trust golems are treating them well and no one's broken the tamper seal on their heads, right? But if people know you're in the room checking up on them, they might try to cover it up. Since golems aren't exactly low-key, they'll send me to keep an eye on things instead."

"And are they? Treating their delivery golem well, I mean?" Nick asked.

Deacon nodded. "Yeah, they're fine."

"Wait," Nat looked around with interest. "This place does delivery now?"

"That explains the clacks tower on the roof," Piper observed.

"Yeah. This part of town gets a couple mail drop-offs a day, too," Deacon pointed out. "If you get your order in the post the first round, it'll get delivered here on the same day and then they'll send their golem out with your curry-with-sore-pig-balls before you know it!"

"I can see why the Trust wants a human to check in on the golems sometimes, but how come your boss can't just do it?" Piper asked.

"Why, Piper, I wouldn't expect you to be so speciesest!" Deacon exclaimed, mocking offense. "My bosses _are_ the golems! If you're talking about their most well-known _human_ manager, though, she spends most of her time with the clacks these days, unless something big comes up. Besides," Deacon grinned, "have you _met_ Adora von Lipwig? The golems want someone with _more_ of a range of human expression than they've got, not _less_."

"Besides, I guess everyone in town would recognize her and her husband," Nat mused. "I mean, they'd kinda stand out."

Deacon laughed. "Everyone in town recognizes her husband's _suit_ , they don't recognize _him_ , that's a difference."

Strong scratched his head. "Who you talking about?"

"Moist von Lipwig," Valentine answered. "You know, the guy who seems to be running, what? Three? Four? government agencies?"

Strong nodded solemnly as a server arrived with his five curries. "Oh. Strong know him. Him shiny." Then he dug into his meal.

22 A traditional beverage, produced from traditional methane, in the old fashion, with none of that new-fangled sugarcane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter is by [Voxel on Tumblr](https://voxel-loves-you.tumblr.com/drawing-commissions), and is very much appreciated.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	10. Hot Coffee Mod * The Body in Question * It’s a Wonderful Life * The Right Thing by Nick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [I Think I'm A Clone Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d-aWMQuoS4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=16) by "Weird Al" Yankovic, [The Clone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMo4qEmBvgg&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=17) by Project Pitchfork, and [Christmas At Ground Zero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t039p6xqutU&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=19&t=0s) by "Weird Al" Yankovic.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Hot Coffee Mod * The Body in Question * It’s a Wonderful Life * The Right Thing by Nick_

Valentine had a night off. He looked over his list of bars, public houses, taverns, jazz dives, coffee houses, and other wretched hives of scum and villainy, thumbed his guidebook, and wondered if he ought to try the molly houses. They weren’t exactly brothels. They were just meeting places, often public houses or coffee shops. That happened to be run by the arm of the Seamstresses’s Guild led by Mr. Harris.

It wasn’t that he wanted to date again or even have a random one-night stand. Valentine wasn’t sure if he was mentally capable of one-night stands. He suspected that he needed some sort of courtship before he could contemplate intimate relations. No, Valentine gloomily accepted that he was going to be pining for the next century. It seemed the sort of thing he’d do.

Valentine thought about trying another museum. Ankh-Morpork had enough of them. He was paging through the list of museums, looking for one that was open at this time of night that he hadn’t been to yet, when a knock came at his door. The synth frowned and looked through the keyhole. He saw robe. He shrugged and opened the door, and of the white-robed student wizard standing before him, he asked, “Who are you and why are you here?”

“I’m not your brother, for starters, and that’s sort of the problem,” answered the wizard, who didn’t seem to be able to stand up straight. He swayed. Valentine couldn’t smell alcohol on him, just a sort of damp, clammy scent. His eyes were bloodshot.

Valentine touched the bridge of his nose. “Tell me who you are, and start from the top with why you want to bother me at my apartment at 3:03 AM.”

“I’m Bengo Macaron… no, that’s not right. I’m Zinon… just Zinon, I think.” He pulled out some notecards from a schoolboy satchel and checked. “Yes. So. You’re our pal DiMA’s brother, yes?” His eyes were tracking something that either wasn’t there or that Valentine couldn’t see. Either option was disconcerting.

“Yes,” Valentine said guardedly. He recognized the student wizard, of course. He’d been in and out of the High Energy Magic building to talk to DiMA often enough, but he’d never gotten to know them particularly well. It was a bit odd that the young man seemed to have a hard time recognizing Valentine, however.

“So, Constable… DiMA thinks he’s me,” Zinon said.

Valentine stared.

“I’m not really sure what happened? Certainly, I have theories. For example, if you use an untargeted _Suggestion_ spell, and you suggest, ‘Work hard, Zinon,’ are you suggesting to the recipient of the spell to both work hard and to be Zinon?” Zinon waved a hand dismissively. “Sloppy spell syntax, there, but I suspect that’s what happened…”

“Why would someone be casting _Suggestion_ spells on DiMA?” Valentine asked plaintively.

“Probably because the mid-level faculty use magic as a crutch because they don’t have the actual authority of the upper level faculty and it’s fun to set up tripwires in the entrances to the lecture halls… I guess. I don’t know. Never set up a tripwire, myself, but some of the older lecturers still use them,” Zinon rambled on, seemingly losing his own point in mid-thought. 

“That sounds… terrible?” Valentine said. “Why do you let that happen?”

“Oh, it’s not bad at all, they hardly ever throw fireballs anymore, and that’s only if you find a very, very old lecturer who has gotten lost in the depths of the University and hasn’t kept up with the times,” Zinon said blithely.

“But you’re saying someone’s messed with DiMA’s mind? That’s got to be some kind of ethics violation,” Valentine said, a sort of creeping horror gnawing at him. He and Vimes had both left DiMA there...

“Probably,” Zinon admitted, “but the big problem is that he thinks he’s me, and he won’t get out of my desk.”

Valentine narrowed his optics. “What do you expect me to do about this?”

“So… we had to bite a spinning wheel, so that we’d stay awake,” Zinon started.

“DiMA doesn’t sleep,” Valentine reminded flatly, increasingly bewildered by the sheer amount of malarky being unpacked in this conversation.

“Hm, no, but he does something else that’s Cultural for him… diagnostics? Diagnostics and defragmentations,” Zinon said hazily, “and he can’t do those anymore.”

A cold dread trickled in Valentine’s coolant lines. “I, uh… start dropping connections if I go more than 24 hours without a diagnostic.”

Zinon said, “I wouldn’t do that in public. Anyway, it’s your basic storybook curse, you know? DiMA’s got to kiss his true love, and strictly speaking, none of us ought to be having romantic loves, but I thought, as his brother, you might know if DiMA was seeing anyone on the side, some extracurriculars, you know?”

"...yeah, but you of all people should know DiMA's sweetie is a fictional character. Didn't you script that bit?" Valentine said, boggled.

Zinon blinked. “But that’s DiMA. I’m talking about DiMA. Y’know, kind of awkward, can’t bait him into an argument, he just makes you reconsider your own position and feel mild existential unease…”

Valentine stared again.

“Anyway, if we can get DiMA to nod off for a moment, I can reclaim my desk,” Zinon concluded.

Valentine stopped by the Yard to claim a Grandmother’s Funeral Day. Watchmen were given three per year. As far he could understand, it was a strange way of describing family and medical leave. At the desk sat Nobby. Nobby looked at Zinon, with his bloodshot eyes and his swaying stance, and the Corporal winked, which made Valentine feel vaguely like he needed to wipe himself off. Nobby said, “Ah, rough night out. Say no more.”

Nick sighed. 

On the way to Unseen University, Zinon pressed, “Okay, so, maybe your brother doesn’t have a swain, but is there anyone he really loves? ...anything? There’s so many sorts of love, you know. Agape, the love of man for the Gods and the Gods for the men, which,” he looked up at the sky, worried, “that’s sort of a crock, really. Gods just say that to get you in bed. Eros, the sexual sort of love, of which, alas, I am forsworn. Philia, brotherly love, the love of friendship between friends and equals. And, of course, storge, the familial love between parents and children. It can also be used to express mere acceptance of situations, such as loving the tyrant… Incidentally, also the love of sports teams. Oh, and then, _I agápi ton patatón_ , the love of potatoes, the most important sort...”

“DiMA’s pretty reserved. It’s sort of hard to tell what he’s thinking,” said Valentine. “Out of all those sorts of love you just went on about, do think you can double up? Have two romantic true loves, sort of thing?”

In the Wasteland, maybe… In Ankh-Morpork, not so much, not in the mainstream culture, but Zinon wasn’t exactly Ankh-Morporkian, to judge by his accent.

Zinon blinked and then said, as if it was obvious, “Well, of course you can have multiple true loves! I’ve always believed that. Personally, on my run through of the game, I did my best to romance every romanceable character in there.” 

Never mind that romancing an icono-game character wasn’t exactly ‘true love’... Zinon’s replies were often tangential at best. The man needed sleep.

Valentine was startled. “You… did _what_?” He paused. “Erm. Would that include me?” Obviously not _him_ , he didn’t have any recollection of any previous game runs by other players. “Nick Valentine?”

Zinon waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, no. At that point, Xian was convinced that the average player would never be good enough for Nick Valentine, so he wasn’t romanceable. I had to add that modification in when it became obvious that the Commander wasn’t interested in spending time with any of the other Companions.”

Worry hit Valentine like a shotgun to the gut. “Wait. So… so you’re saying I love him because I was modified to love him?”

Zinon shook his head, “I wouldn’t say so. More like you were modified to have the _potential_ to reciprocate his advances, but the Commander completely missed all of those options and any of the hints that were being dropped.”

Valentine muttered dryly, “You don’t say…” Still, the worry gnawed at him. It was one thing to accept that he would be pining for a century, because that was how he was. It was another to consider _why_ he was how he was and the wherefores that had led up to the whys.

Zinon continued without noticing, as wizards often did, “We were pretty sure we wouldn’t even get a chance to test Xian’s ‘Lover’s Embrace’ perk. Then Nick Valentine… er… you, I suppose, started going off script - at first we couldn’t figure out where the new dialogue was coming from, but then we figured out that you were writing your own dialogue and making your own choices. So _you_ decided to romance _him_. There wasn’t anything in the original code or the mod for that, but once you had a mind of your own, it turned out, well, you _really_ had a mind of your own.”

Valentine considered that and murmured, “No kidding. I suppose that makes a sort of sense, if he was skipping the ‘romantic advances’ options because he was oblivious to any dropped hints.” And oh, boy, was Vimes oblivious to those. Valentine frowned and considered how much effort it took to finally actually _get_ Vimes’s attention. “Erm… you sure you guys didn’t mod _him_ to be romanceable instead?”

“Ha, ha, no, that would be unethical. Mister Stibbons would have a bee in his knees,” said Zinon.

“If Mister Stibbons cares so much about ethics, can we get him in to sort out this whole weird enforced lack of sleep and people thinking they’re the wrong people?” Valentine asked.

“N-no. No. Mister Stibbons is busy,” Zinon said hurriedly.

When they arrived in the students’ work section of the High Energy Magic Building, DiMA was sitting at a desk marked with a Railroad sign and a red urn with black figures, and he was playing around with a little clamshell device with arm straps. It looked like a junky Pip-Boy. Valentine had seen them around town; they were the hot new item that everyone wanted for the holidays. The Thieves’ Guild was making a mint both reselling them and selling warranty plans to ensure they wouldn’t be stolen.

DiMA’s entire stance and posture was different, more fluid, but with a bit of a sway to it. A takeout container sat next to DiMA. With horror, Valentine watched as DiMA picked up a grape leaf-wrap and ate it. DiMA said, in a pitch-perfect copy of Zinon’s voice, “Hello, Constable Valentine. I’m a bit busy at the moment. I almost have all of the terrain generated for our next expansion. I have to get this done, you see.”

Valentine’s fuel pump sank. He turned to Zinon, and he pleaded, “Can’t you… unmagic this, somehow?”

Zinon, however, was distracted by DiMA’s takeout, and he demanded, “Dolmades, moussaka, kolokythokeftedes - where did you even get this!?”

“Didactylos’s Cave. It’s new. The kolokythokeftedes don’t have enough burnt crunchy bits. They’re not how yaya made them,” said DiMA.

“You don’t have a yaya!” Zinon snapped, and he reached for one of the dolmades, only for DiMA to sharply rap him on the knuckles.

“Dolmades are _my_ favourite,” DiMA said petulantly, popping another dolmades in his mouth. “You can have some of the moussaka.”

“No, dolmades are my favourite!” Zinon argued. He turned to Valentine. “I didn’t even know there was a new Ephebian joint open. Why is he better at being me than I am?”

“DiMA, you can’t eat,” Valentine said, in a small voice. “Zinon, we’re going to need to get him to a bathroom and open him up.”

“Who are you talking about, Constable Valentine?” DiMA asked, puzzled.

“DiMA,” Valentine said hoarsely.

“He’s a fictional character,” DiMA said, matter of factly.

“Say, uh, who is this?” Valentine asked, pointing at Zinon.

DiMA squinted. “Bengo Macarona, famous wizard and footballer.” Then he pulled out one of the drawers on the desk, rummaged about, found a false bottom, and pulled out a set of Bengo Macarona commemorative stamps.

Zinon leapt over the desk, tackled DiMA out the chair, and shouted, “You put those away!”

As DiMA and Zinon grappled with Ephebian style wrestling moves that mirrored each other almost exactly, Valentine sat down and held his head. Synths could be overwritten with new personalities. That was what their lore said. DiMA himself was very good at writing new personalities for synths. Apparently, he’d gone and done it to himself in some weird magical misunderstanding.

As far as Nick knew, there was no indication a synth’s original personality could ever be recovered. Deacon had a joke about that. Once rewritten, a synth was gone.23

DiMA, Valentine’s only brother, with all his flaws and hopes and aspirations, no longer existed.

This was such an _inane_ way to go, too. Who was Valentine going to mourn to? Vimes, at best, didn’t like DiMA, and the topic was hardly good dinner conversation. Piper wouldn’t understand.

Eventually, DiMA extricated himself from the fight and dusted off his hands. “And that is why your philosophical position is extremely dubious. Now then…”

That was when Valentine clocked DiMA and dragged him off to a lavatory, a rather bruised Zinon following behind and giving directions. Then Valentine unscrewed DiMA’s synthflesh panels and dumped out his main holding reservoir while Zinon held DiMA down. Numbly, Valentine put DiMA back together, wondering just _how_ DiMA was mentally processing what was happening. 

DiMA looked at the mess in the toilet and said blearily, “I haven’t puked like that since I was an undergrad and did an all-night bender at the Mended Drum and then ate two of Dibbler’s sausages.”

Zinon looked to Valentine and said sharply, “Not one word.”

DiMA toddled off. Valentine followed him anxiously, thinking. It had taken Valentine, oh, two weeks to realize he wasn’t human? He’d been written that way. How long was it going to take for DiMA to realize that he was a Gen 2 synth whose mind was a copy of a grad student wizard? Well, he wasn’t DiMA anymore, but whoever he was, Valentine felt some obligation to help him sort through it all. Three Grandmother’s Funeral Days weren’t going to be enough.

DiMA sat back down at the desk before Zinon could get there, and Valentine noted that DiMA had grabbed himself a cup of coffee. At least clear liquids were fairly harmless for Gen 2s to drink. DiMA strapped on the odd clamshell fake Pip-Boy device, as if he were right-handed, like Zinon, instead of in his natural left-handed fashion. “...and there we go, we have rendered terrain. Or _I_ have rendered terrain, to be precise. Chatur’s gone, Xian is sobbing over his fanfic, Alf’s gone for takeout, and I can’t find DiMA anywhere.”

“How’d you do it? That was taking me forever,” asked Zinon.

“Crossbred imps with cuttlefish for the colour-changing skin, then squashed them flat between two glass plates,” said DiMA, holding up the device strapped on his arm to show Zinon. “It works much nicer than the Genuan chameleon alligator skin ones we’re making now.”

“Cuttlefish! Damn, I knew that…” Zinon said, sulking.

“And come here, look at the resolution on Nick Valentine’s old character model... Of course, he’s not in this game, which is a criminal shame, but it isn’t like the target audience for this game would even understand the subtleties of his plot, let alone something with the moral nuance of Far Harbor,” said DiMA.

Zinon scooted over and examined the image on the small screen. “Shoot. That’s actually really good. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I would have thought of it myself soon.” He glared at DiMA.

“Moral nuance?” Valentine asked, discomforted by the thought that DiMA had crossbred a sort of demon with a tentacled entity from the deep and then thought squashing it flat between plates and wearing it around on his arm was a good idea.

“Yes, initial testers said _Aftermath_ lacked shades of grey and difficult ethical dilemmas, so with Far Harbor, I explored those themes, giving Nick Valentine a brother to further explore his past. It’s delightfully messy. The glowing hearted-detective has a brother who wants a peaceful society as much as Nick does… and is also a murderer, something intolerable to the good detective,” said DiMA blithely.

As DiMA wittered on about Valentine’s motivations in front of him and how his own personal family tragedy had been designed based off consumer feedback, Zinon looked monumentally embarrassed and mumbled, “... Sweet Patina, please tell me I don't act like this...”

Valentine gritted his teeth and said lowly, “Y’want an honest answer, Zinon?”

DiMA toggled some runes along the side of the screen and pulled up an image of something like a dragon and said proudly, “Scorchbeasts! They’re all-new assets. We even managed to get them flying! Now that _I_ have the rendering working, this ought to go much quicker.” He picked up his cup of coffee and downed it.

“I, ah… should admit. I’ve been getting into Chatur’s coffee since he’s been gone?” said Zinon, nervously. “Chatur’s Klatchian. That’s Klatchian coffee.”

DiMA blinked, and then he didn’t blink at all.

23 Nick, of course, had never played any of the previous games, and so he was only aware of retconned lore. Deacon’s nature tended to be a bit more meta than Nick’s.

* * *

Klatchian coffee stripped away all comforting illusions. It took one past sobriety and straight to knurd. 

DiMA wasn’t Zinon Elias, graduate student wizard, originally of Ephebe. That illusion went first.

DiMA had a problem with cognitive dissonance. He was _designed_ to have a problem with cognitive dissonance. He was designed to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in _Aftermath_ ,24 where the player character was presented as either a respected soldier or a lawyer with a family, and yet, one could go on to play a cannibal who would kill their child with a weapon made from their child’s toy rocket. So what was the point of the backstory at all, if players could then go on to play their characters in any fashion they saw as entertaining? In a world with synth dopplegangers, might that just suggest that the player character was one?

But it was cognitive dissonance that made DiMA the sort of person who would diplomatically plead for peace and suggest that murder was always an option in the same sentence. It was cognitive dissonance that would have DiMA say that perhaps guilt would keep him focused, knowing well that he had a tendency to deliberately forget anything he found too difficult. He would say that he wanted humanity and synths to treat as other as equals, all the while replacing humans with synths to try to make them behave better. He would express his horror over that concept and then turn around and suggest it all over again. 

Those illusions were stripped away.

DiMA saw that he was a precarious collection of contradictory noble aspirations and dark inclinations, all strapped together with bailing wire. He was too tolerant, to the point of passivity. Being non-judgmental was generally a virtue, but he’d made it a vice by taking it so far that others were put in danger. He would stand and fight too late. He felt like the old synth on the mountain, but in reality, he was perhaps two months old.

There was almost nothing filling his head. It was all garbage data. DiMA would have no storage difficulties at all for nearly a century, if only he could sit down and run a proper deep defragmentation.

He could see the magic of the curses wrapped around him, glowing like stillness in the air. DiMA could _really_ see it, sharply in focus. There was also a number, counting down. Zinon could see magic properly, of course, and DiMA had thought he was Zinon, and Zinon might have noticed if he couldn’t see magic properly, but…

One had to see what was actually there to see magic.

Feeling reality-hungover, DiMA looked over at his brother, who was kneeling at his side, the picture of concern, while Zinon stood out of striking distance. DiMA commented weakly, "I am glad you're here, brother, but shouldn't you be at work?" 

“...brother? Erm, who do you think you are?” Valentine asked, with cautious hope.

“I _am_ DiMA,” DiMA said, reaching back to rub one of his vacuum tubes. “Hmm. I have an answer to whether or not we’re affected by Klatchian coffee, in case you were wondering… I do apologize if I frightened you.”

“God, yes, you frightened me!” Valentine said. “I thought you’d overwritten yourself with Zinon!”

“Apparently, Klatchian coffee strips away even those illusions, a useful property I will need to investigate further,” DiMA mused.

“So will you get out of my desk?” demanded Zinon.

“...yes, your chair isn’t particularly comfortable,” said DiMA, standing stiffly.

"Now, don’t worry about my work. I took a day off for my grandmother's funeral. I’m just glad you’re… better?" said Valentine.

"... Nick, we don't have a grandmother," DiMA observed, head tilted.

"Yeah, I might have noticed,” Valentine said dryly. “For some reason it's just what the Watch calls family leave."

"...This sounds like an intentional self-delusion on the Watch's part," said DiMA, who would know.

"Well, yeah, there's a lot of that going around among the folks who haven't been overdosing on Klatchian coffee," said Valentine, lips spread thinly. “Look, you’re clearly not doing so hot here. Zinon told me about a… spinning wheel? And… ‘fluences? I know wizards are above the law or something hoity toity, but what can I do for you? There’s gotta be something.”

“In the vernacular of your own genre, you are the best man in your world and a good man in any world, Nick Valentine,” said DiMA, smiling faintly, “May I kiss your forehead, Nick?”

“Er… sure, if you think it would help,” said Valentine, shifting awkwardly.

DiMA did, light as a quantum weather butterfly. The octarine curse band that snaked around him like rose vines, piercing thorn-deep into his synthflesh, withered and died. “Thank you, brother. I’m going to defragment now…”

24 [Bethesda seemed to have figured out their mistake.](https://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout-4/fallout-4-intro) Wizards never admit to mistakes, so presumably DiMA was intended to point out the mistakes of _other_ wizards.

* * *

Valentine caught DiMA and settled him down on a stool. DiMA was solidly out, and Valentine imagined that DiMA would be out for at least a few hours. He felt a sense of relief, and he said aloud, “Brotherly love, huh?”

“Your relationship with your brother is much better than the one I had with mine,” said Zinon grimly, unstrapping the clamshell from DiMA’s arm.

Because having a brother whom Valentine had to constantly worry might have murdered someone and then forgotten about it was such a great situation.

Xian wandered back in, a stormcloud following over his head, and he looked at DiMA and observed enviously, “He’s nodded off.”

“Yes! The wonders of philia. Now come here, and look at these improved renders I have done,” said Zinon, holding up the clamshell.

“Lucky,” Xian said, sulking, “I didn’t get along with my brothers, and hmm… you actually have the renders working. How’d you do it?”

As Zinon animatedly explained, “Crossbred imps with cuttlefish and pressed them between two glass plates.”

“Yeah. Pretty clever. Figured it out all by himself,” Valentine said dryly, electing not to mention DiMA had actually done it.

Xian took a few steps back. “...crossbreeding demons and tentacle entities from the ocean? That’s… how you get a very specific genre of artwork and fiction, Zinon.”

“Yes, I know, but look, it works!” Zinon insisted, “Much better than the chameleon alligator skin we were using in the Mark 1s.”

“I have some quests scripted out, we could see if they’ll run,” said Xian. “Do you want to come and try them, Constable Valentine?”

“No,” Valentine said emphatically, and he pulled out his copy of _Pride and Extreme Prejudice_ to emphasize the point. “Why are you even making this, anyway?”

“Lady Rust says it sells, and by that, I mean she says it sells for her,” Xian said, frowning.

“Why do you care?” Valentine asked, flipping to where he’d left off in his book. It was dedicated to Commander Samuel Vimes. Valentine hadn’t worked up the gumption to ask him why. Vimes had clearly led a fantastically weird life. The whole Commonwealth portion of it might not even have been the strangest bit.

Zinon looked shifty, but Xian admitted, “...this is a class project for a grade.”

“You’re saying that unpaid student work for a class is being done at the behest of a rich broad so she can sell it?” Valentine said.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” said Zinon.

“I would,” said Xian, clearly enchanted.

“Huh. Your quests did actually load. What’s this one? ‘Feed the People’?” said Zinon.

And then the wizarding students were distracted. Valentine sat next to DiMA and read his book. Zinon and Xian argued about whether or not ‘Feed the People’ should distribute tinned steamed currant pudding to every player on the network and then were derailed by a scorchbeast apparently spawning inside an abandoned house. Valentine was somewhat amazed that they were able to manage any alpha-testing with all of their arguing. He kept his nose down in his book. _Pride and Extreme Prejudice_ was a decent enough yarn. 

Alf returned with the takeout and made the argument a threeway up until he realized that DiMA had gotten out of the spinning wheel curse by kissing his brother, upon which he excused himself to go check if his mum had cooked bubble and squeak for supper. Valentine had to amble over to the section of the library that was open to the mundane sorts and check out a few more books, because as it turned out, it took DiMA an eight solid hours of defragmentation, his drives plugging away, before he awoke.

DiMA said drowsily, “Nick, when you have a chance, run a deep defragmentation. All my empty years in between snippets of backstory were filled with garbage data. I would suspect that your memory banks are the same.”

Valentine paused. Empty years in between snippets of backstory. Yes, that was what Valentine had. He thought about Vimes, with a book dedicated to him and hundreds of coppers on his force, all with dozens of stories about him. Now there was a man with a life. “I’ll try that when I have a chance. Now, let's get you out of here.”

“I can’t go. I can’t just leave them on their own. I need to deal with this,” said DiMA quietly but firmly.

“And thaaat’s why I’m getting you out of here,” said Valentine, matching that firmness with his own. “DiMA, you make bad choices when you’re backed into a corner. And even when you’re not? Honestly, you just make bad choices...” 

DiMA narrowed his optics at Nick and said reproachfully, “I’m just going to go talk to Mister Stibbons.”

“No!” said Zinon. “You’re not in any of Mister Stibbons’s classes, but what about us and our grades?”

“If Mister Stibbons is the sort of wizard we would all like him to be, there won’t be any trouble with your grades. If Mister Stibbons isn’t the sort of wizard that we hope he is, then we shouldn’t care about his opinion, even if said opinion is expressed in the form of grades,” said DiMA.

“That’s a beautiful sentiment, but it’s rubbish, and you know it,” said Zinon.

“DiMA knows where the grades get turned in,” pointed out Xian, making a not-so-subtle implication. “So yeah, I think he should go talk to Mister Stibbons. He’s more magic resistant than any of us, anyway.”

“I am?” said DiMA. “Oh. I suppose that would explain a few things…”

“Yes, I’ve observed it takes a few extra times to actually cast a spell on you. Ahem… not that I’ve tried, or anything. I think it has something to do with how your unreal technology being nuclear hardened maps over to a real world with real magic,” admitted Xian.

Valentine thought that Xian might not be admitting that if he’d had a full night’s sleep. “Okay. Fine. Go talk to Mister Stibbons. But I’m going to check on you more often, and I reserve the right to take you out of here if I have to haul you kicking and screaming. I almost lost you, DiMA. I’m not doing that again.”

* * *

It was around 3:00 AM, lightly drizzling freezing rain, the sky covered with the familiar smog that smothered the stars. Valentine leaned back against a wall and took what would have been a drag on his cigarette if he actually had lungs. He wasn’t on duty, but his last shift had been a doozy - a Mirelurk had appeared down by the docks, the Watch had been called in to arbitrate who could claim fishing rights for it. Eventually, it had gone to Verity Pushpram, and from there, to the tables of the finest restaurants of Ankh-Morpork.

This night, Valentine had gone with Betgruna Runearmour to Thank Gods It’s Open, which managed to feel like a sub-par commercial chain despite actually being family-owned. Runearmour was going back to Llamedos soon. She’d already been offered a position as a Sergeant in one of their rain mining towns. More pay, less work. A lot of Watchmen just cycled through the Ankh-Morpork City Watch like that. They came, they got their training, they left for better prospects.

He’d walked Runearmour home. Almonté, Wahlulu, Bearhuggers Whiskey Cream, and vodka hit harder than than dwarfs wanted to admit.

Drinking was easier when he went with an organic. It also made it social drinking, by default, and Valentine was a social creature.

The light of his cigarette slowly guttered and died. The streets were still busy, even in the dark, although the traffic was lighter. It was easier to pick out individual people, even children of various species. Many of them had actual homes and wandered out of boredom, but street children were common. Some were looking for mischief, and Valentine often had a word or two with them.

One child, Valentine easily picked out as neither a street child nor one looking for mischief. Valentine knew him as if he were his own.

Shaun Vimes.

Valentine shadowed him for a while. That boy should _not_ have been out on his own. A duke’s son was a plum for any kidnapper. The boy was meandering around in the general vicinity of Welcome Soap, not far from where Valentine lived. He seemed to be looking furtively for someone or something. Valentine let it go as far as he could, before some unsavories started showing interest, and then he approached Shaun and greeted, “Hey there, kiddo. You shouldn’t be out at night.”

“Dad!” said Shaun, lighting up, and he rushed Valentine and hugged him tightly.

“We’ve talked about that, it’s not really - ” Valentine started.

“I don’t care. S’not like anyone’s going to hear, anyway,” said Shaun mulishly.

Valentine lowered his voice, “Actually, there’s about three thugs with their eyes on you, so you’re going to walk away with me, and we’re going to turn into the first restaurant I find.”

He didn’t mention the other man tailing Shaun, too. Best not to panic the kid. The first restaurant turned out to be Didactylos’s Cave, a newish Ephebian all-night diner. The waitress was clearly too tired to care about a boy walking in with an Unalive, and they sat themselves down at a booth.

“I was looking for you, actually! And I found you,” said Shaun, looking over the menu, which was already grubby, despite the diner being newish. “Some real detective work, huh? I reasoned, you must live close to the Yard, and I thought about the time delay of when I know you’ve left work and stopped at home and then come over...”

“Why come looking for me? You coulda got yourself snatched,” said Valentine, frowning.

Shaun looked worried and admitted, “Because… I’m a synth.”

The apathetic waitress came by. Valentine ordered a coffee. Shaun ordered a coffee, too, but Valentine amended, “Cream and sugar in his,” thinking about how human children were about bitter tastes. Then Shaun asked for the sampler platter and the flaming cheese. The waitress left.

“So. How do you figure that?” asked Valentine carefully.

“I’m good at telling time without a clock -” Shaun started.

“So is young Sam,” said Valentine.

Shaun glared at him. “I don’t sleep well.”

“Neither does your father.”

“I can’t remember a full life.”

“None of us can,” said Valentine ruefully. They were fictional characters made real. They didn’t have full lives to remember.

Shaun locked an intent stare on Valentine and concluded, “I’m a copy of young Sam.”

Valentine sighed, “Your parents _should_ have talked about this with you.”

“You _are_ one of my parents,” Shaun said mulishly.

The waitress dropped off their coffees. Shaun’s was really a cup of cream and sugar with a little coffee, which looked about right. Valentine sipped his coffee and hunched over the table. “Yeah. You’re a Gen 3.”

“I knew it!” said Shaun, both vindicated but also clearly a bit upset to be right. He trembled. “So… so… you were the prototype for synths who are copies of humans, weren’t you? So you _are_ my dad. My real dad.”

“Uhm,” said Valentine, feeling rather intensely uncomfortable. “In a storyline sense, but you have to understand, it’s just a storyline…”

“And DiMA’s my uncle?” said Shaun.

“Shaun, let’s not get ahead of ourselves -” Valentine tried.

The sampler platter arrived. It appeared to consist of mystery tentacles, fried things, fried tentacles, wrapped up stuff, and beige dip. The flaming cheese was cheese that happened to be on fire. Shaun tucked into it and said, mouth full, “Why don’t you want me?”

“Oh. Oh, Shaun, it’s not that I don’t want to be in your life, it’s that… I don’t have a place there, anymore,” Valentine sighed. There was no spot in a household for the father’s ex-boyfriend.

“I could go live with you,” said Shaun, who obliterated the fried tentacles and moved on to the fried… things.

“Putting aside the fact that your parents are gonna kill me eight ways to Sunday when I get you home, I can’t give you a life like they can. You’ve got a mother and a father, you’ve got a brother, a nice house, they put good food on your plate, they send you to a fancy school -”

“It’s horrible. The teacher just lets us all do whatever. There’s no structure,” Shaun said sulkily. “Young Sam gets actual homework. Sometimes I do his because I get bored and then we both get in trouble. Anyway, it’s… not like I’m a real person. Old Sam and Sybil will get tired of me -”

“Hey, no, kiddo. One, you’re absolutely a real person, no matter what you might have heard in the Institute about synths, and there’s no way Sam and Sybil will ever do anything other than love you,” said Valentine, frowning with concern. He’d been through the first half of that himself. Personhood was a difficult issue for a synth.

A bit of tentacle twitched on Shaun’s lip as he wolfed it down. “How can you say that, when old Sam left you?”

* * *

Sybil hadn’t realized that Shaun was gone. Neither had Vimes, because for once, he’d actually slept like he should, so when Valentine showed up with Shaun a little past 4 AM, Vimes rather panicked. Sybil was a bit alarmed, yes, but Shaun was back home, intact, and whatever had happened could be sorted out. To her Vimes, though, he had committed some colossal failure as a father by actually getting a night’s rest and thereby not noticing that Shaun had headed out the bedroom window.

Sybil noticed when Willikins materialized a few minutes after, quietly in the background. He busied himself making a round of hot cocoa. Shaun wandering off probably hadn’t gone as unnoticed as Vimes believed. Sybil had Willikins put the cocoa down on a nearby table, and she waved him off. Codsworth lurked in the background. The machine butler knew about the… issues around Shaun and Valentine, but it would be just as well if Willikins wasn’t here for this.

Shaun resisted being handed over, but Valentine prodded, “C’mon, kiddo. You’re home. Get some sleep… if you can.” He looked to Vimes and Sybil. “Gotta admit, I did give him coffee.”

“I understand what I did to deserve this,” ‘this’ meaning a caffeinated child, “but what did poor Sybil do?” said Vimes.

“This isn’t home,” Shaun sulked.

Sybil’s eyes widened. She’d tried her best to welcome the poor, traumatised boy, to make him feel at ease. She started, “I know it’s been an adjustment - ”

“Home was with Nick,” said Shaun defiantly, lip quivering, “I’m not even human! And you didn’t even tell me - I had to figure that out on my own! I’m just a synthetic copy of young Sam.”

“We wanted to let you settle in. We were going to tell you eventually,” offered Vimes placatingly, eyes desperate, “It’s a lot more complicated than that, but even if it wasn’t, you’re not just a copy.”

Sybil nodded and offered her hand. “You’ll feel better after some rest.”

"No!" Shaun protested, grabbing onto Valentine's legs. He shot an accusing glare at Vimes. "You said he was going to be my dad, too! How come he's hardly ever here?"

Vimes looked poleaxed. "Shaun, that was... that was in the Commonwealth. At the time, I thought your mother was dead, and..."

"She's back and now you don't love Nick anymore, even though you could again," Shaun accused, not letting go of Valentine's legs. His lips trembled, and tears started to fall from his eyes. "Now that you have the real Sam back, are you going to stop loving me, too?"

Valentine dropped to a knee as he put his arms around Shaun, trying to comfort the boy, and he made a soft, shushing noise. "C'mon, sport," he began. "Nobody's g-"

But by that point Sybil, who had seen her boys in enough pain, decided it was time to take charge. She stepped forward, and then kneeled in front of Valentine so that she could place her hand on Shaun's back. " _Nobody_ has stopped loving anyone, and nobody is going to stop loving anyone," she stated firmly. Valentine's optics widened, and she gave him a startled look - surely he knew? - but rather than offering an explanation, she said firmly, "Mister Valentine, I think it would be best if you stayed until later in the morning. I'll have Codsworth set up a room for you."

"As you wish, mum," said the Mr. Handy, before floating off to do just that. 

Sybil helped Valentine gather the still crying child into his arms as Vimes watched, at a loss at how to help. Valentine patted the boy, trying to calm him, but he looked between Sybil and Vimes. There were clearly things he wanted to ask, but for the moment, he set them aside to put Shaun first. When Valentine caught Vimes's gaze, Vimes guiltily dropped it. Sybil, however, returned his look with an expression of warmth and sadness.

Vimes started to explain, “Now, Shaun. We’ve talked about this. It isn’t about Nick being a synth - ”

There was another knock at the door. Codsworth answered it. There appeared to be no one there, but a panicked, squeaky voice insisted, “No, don’t close the door! I’m here, hanging off this enormous knocker!”

Vimes cautiously peered around the door and hazarded, “Lance-Constable Artificial Flavours?” He held out his arm, and a rat dropped off the door and onto his arm and scurried up to his shoulder.

“Yes, sir! Sorry to bother you, sir! I saw Valentine go by with young Master Shaun from the Yard window, and I tried to catch up with him, but they were a bit fast for me,” said a rather out of breath rat.

The rat was in a ratty version of a Watch uniform, Sybil noted.

“You need me for something, Flavours?” asked Valentine.

“Yeah, got a witness on a murder case who wants to talk to you,” said the rat. 

Valentine had briefly mentioned at dinner one time that he was often assigned a partner called Artificial Flavours; he said he thought Sergeant Flint was pulling his leg. Sybil was also vaguely aware that there was a tourist town in Uberwald that had talking rats, but she had not put those two things together. The Watch had to move with the times, she supposed.

“Hey, Shaun? I know I’m not on duty, but murder’s a serious business. Y’mind if I go get this?” Valentine asked. 

Ready to run off to work even when he wasn’t on duty? Vimes had apparently found a broke, mechanical version of himself when he’d found himself a boyfriend, Sybil observed.

Shaun sniffled and wiped his nose. Then he pointed out the obvious, “He’s a talking rat.”

“I get that a lot,” Flavours said dryly.

“Murder?” Vimes asked. Sybil could see his mind derailing from what had been the topic at hand.

“Uh huh. Troll woman, sir,” said Flavours.

A certain amount of violence was Cultural for trolls, but they weren’t often murdered. For one thing, killing a troll was very difficult, and for another thing, while trolls often had enemies, they didn’t often attract the kind of enemies who went in for murder.

“A troll murder victim?” said Vimes, aloud.

“When will you be back?” Shaun asked, looking at Valentine.

Valentine looked at Sybil, who was usually the one who invited him over.

“Can you be here for Hogswatch?” asked Shaun hopefully, “And we could have a big party with Nat and Piper and Deacon and Preston -”

“Mr. Garvey is out of town,” Sybil reminded gently.

“And I’m triple-shifting on Hogswatch Eve and Hogswatch Day,” said Valentine.

Vimes blinked and sputtered, “ _Why_ are you doing that?”

“Because those days don’t mean anything to me, and everyone else wants them off?” said Valentine, shrugging.

“Oh,” Shaun said, clearly disappointed, “Can we go on a picnic next week?”

“In the snow?” asked Valentine, confused.

“Yes,” said Sybil, firmly. She and Vimes had humoured young Sam when he’d gone through a phase of being interested in poop for the better portion of a year. They could humour Shaun wanting a family picnic in the snow.

“It’s a picnic, then.” Valentine gave Shaun a pat and let him go, looking to Flavours, who scuttled down Vimes and then climbed up onto Valentine’s shoulder.

Vimes looked ready to follow Valentine and Flavours, because Flavours had made the mistake of saying ‘murder’, but Sybil tapped Vimes on the shoulder and ahemed, looking pointedly at Shaun. Vimes looked guilty, and he said, “You’ll have the report on my desk?”

“Always do,” said Valentine.

* * *

Vimes and Sybil managed to settle Shaun down to bed, insisting that they didn’t love him any less, whatever his species was, and that he was in absolutely no danger of being discarded. Shaun and young Sam had school, anyway, so Shaun needed at least a bit of sleep.

Vimes had work in the morning, but that didn’t mean he was sleeping properly. Vimes leaned against Sybil in their oversized bed, both of them propped up by the ridiculous number of pillows that covered the bed. Vimes had let a few tears escape, though he seemed to be trying to hide it. Sybil had her arm around him and held him against her larger body. She sighed. "You know, Sam, I... have to admit. I don't really understand why he's been so... willing to just step aside." A bloody row probably wouldn't be any better for the children, of course, but meek surrender was alien to the Ramkin mindset. Ramkins did not give up what was theirs. “I know we talked about it, back at the beginning, and his points were… logical, but this isn’t a logical matter.”

They were both quiet for a long while, then finally Vimes explained softly, "Dear, his earliest memories were waking up in a trash heap. He... sometimes has a hard time believing he deserves anything good." Vimes paused a moment, then clarified, "Anything he views as good, anyway."

Sybil narrowed her eyes and looked thoughtfully at the top of Vimes's head at the clarification. So it was that, was it? That sort of thinking didn't come naturally to her. Indeed, most of her social circle felt far too highly of themselves and what they deserved. But years of living with Vimes had taught her to recognize it from the outside. Vimes himself was doing it even then: he just couldn't admit that he might actually be a good thing.

So now Nick Valentine was nobly standing aside to let Vimes have his happiness because Valentine didn't believe himself as deserving it; and Vimes, who was hurting both because he missed Nick and because he could see how much he was hurting Valentine, tried to stoically do the 'right thing' for the sake of Sybil and the boys; and now Shaun, who had already lost both his Institute family and his name, was afraid of losing the love of _both_ fathers; and it was only a matter of time before Young Sam, who had already grown quite fond of his new older-younger brother and strange new quasi-uncle, started to get upset because everyone around him was upset. All this, because everyone was so bloody busy trying to nobly set aside their own happiness for the sake of others' happiness that **no one** actually got to _be_ happy.

Well, bollocks to that.

Sybil began gently replacing her body with more pillows so that she could climb out of bed. Vimes opened his eyes and gave her a confused look, but before he could ask anything she said, "Don't worry, dear, I just have some reading I need to do." Then she kissed Vimes on the forehead and left the room.

* * *

Lady Sybil had been, from the moment Vimes had admitted that he’d had… it wasn’t an affair; an affair would have implied a certain intentionality about it, a specific knowledge of transgression, been curious about what sort of other person would catch his attention. There weren’t many. When Vimes had explained that it wasn’t another woman but a man, Sybil had wondered about a hypothetical _Mr._ Vimes to the Duke of Ankh, only he wouldn’t have been a Mr. Vimes.

There was a precedent, in the very oldest issues of Twurp’s Peerage, the ones that went all the way back to the Kings of Ankh, where a Duke had occasioned to, in a small chapel of Astoria, marry a Baron, who had then been styled a Marquess, equivalent to the Quirmian Marquis, because he certainly wasn’t going to be a _Duchess_. With their two armies combined, they’d conquered much of the surrounding areas and set fire to more. They’d had five children, legitimized bastards all, unlike their fathers, who were simply utter bastards.

Marquess Nick Valentine-Vimes.

Vimes could have certainly done worse. Lady Sybil was very much alive and intended to stay that way, but she’d seen how Valentine was with her Vimes, and even more importantly, with young Sam and Shaun. Vimes’s judgement was better than he gave himself credit for. If he was going to have a husband, Valentine would have been a fine one. If, gods forbid, young Sam had needed a step-parent, Sybil could find no fault in Valentine doing the job laid before him.

* * *

“Okay, dead troll woman, suspected murder, witness wants to talk to me. Why?” said Valentine aloud, as he walked to the yard with Flavours on his shoulder. Strong knew more trolls than Valentine did!

“Oh, uh,” Flavours fidgeted. “Thing is, she asked for ‘dat molly Watchman’, and we’re all just guessing who she actually wants.”

Valentine sighed wearily, “Flavours. I’m going to explain this once. No, I did not have a random one night stand with a wizard. That was Nobby misunderstanding things.”

“Sure, sure,” said Flavours.

“But,” Valentine continued, still labouring under the delusion that it was best to be open about what he was, as far as was possible, “I do like men. And women. Probably other options, too? I’m not a molly. I’m bisexual.”

Flavours gave him a weird look. “You’re a velocipede?”

“No!” said Valentine, frustrated. “Bisexual means I like, uh, same and different.” 

“So you’re a molly,” Flavours concluded.

“That is exactly what I didn’t just say,” Valentine muttered darkly.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a molly, I s’pose,” said Flavours, hurriedly.

“Flavours, is a werewolf a wolf or a human?” Valentine asked.

“Neither, and that’s very rude to ask,” Flavours said primly, reciting the ‘textbook’ answer by rote.

“Right. And that’s why I’m not a molly, which, yes, there’s nothing wrong with being, but _I’m something different_ ,” Valentine said. He was trying and failing to come out to a rat. Wonderful.

At the Yard, there was a troll woman in a flowing green dress who looked at him and said, “No, I meant dat human - oh, I recognise dis one, though. Him try pull that pile of schist off me. Him sweet but stupid. Him a molly?” She looked vaguely disappointed.

What Valentine got out of that was that she’d been looking for a specific male human Watchman who was attracted to men - well, there had to be some, Valentine reasoned - and now she was disappointed that Valentine wasn’t attracted to women, because people kept assuming that being attracted to men and being attracted to women were two mutually exclusive entities. He put all that aside. “Uhm. Will you give me a statement on this case?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging.

So they sat down together in an interview room, and Valentine pulled out a notebook. Her name was Gneiss, and she was a lounge singer. She’d found her friend, Kyanite, who was also a lounge singer, shattered on the street, in the alley behind the joint where Kyanite had been singing. The time had been around midnight, and she’d found her friend because they’d planned on going out together. When her friend hadn’t turned up, she’d gone looking for her. Why had Gneiss waited from around midnight to around 3:00 AM to report it? It didn’t take that long to walk to the Yard.

Gneiss looked shifty then. She said with impressive delicacy for a troll, “Not sure if you Watch do any ghuhging25 thing ‘bout it. Maybe say she a criminal, so say she don’t matter.”

Valentine had to ask, “And why would we say she’s a criminal?”

Gneiss snorted. “I s’pose it not obvious, if you not troll. She had plaster work done.”

Facial plastic surgery for humans, vampires, werewolves, dwarfs, and other organic humanoids was relatively advanced in Ankh-Morpork, as Deacon had discovered to his delight. Even golems not uncommonly went in for decorative re-glazings. For trolls, however, plaster work had been illegal for a long time, although some of the Patrician’s recent changes might have legalized that. Lawyers were still debating the matter. The rationale that Valentine had been told was that troll criminals used plaster work to disguise themselves, but wouldn’t human criminals use plastic surgery for the same thing? Why were trolls singled out?

The answer to that was simple and depressing: trolls were singled out for unequal treatment because they were trolls. 

“I understand your hesitation,” Valentine admitted, “but we’ll take this seriously, all the same. Thank you for talking with me.”

“You really a molly?” asked Gneiss.

“No, I don’t _only_ like men,” said Valentine, “But I’m also on the job26, if we could just go over a few other things…”

25 [Exact translation unknown.](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Trollish_phrases)

26 He had to cut her off quickly. Being hit on by a troll usually meant being hit by a troll. With a rock.

* * *

Gneiss, though alternately teary and angry, felt up for showing the Watch where the body was. Kyanite’s diamond teeth had already been stolen, which enraged Detritus, who had gone along because this was a troll victim, and no one was going to go around killing trolls on his watch. 

“So the body’s been disturbed,” said Valentine to Flavours.

“I’m definitely disturbed,” said Flavours, sticking out his tongue.

He sketched out the shattered rock in his notebook and looked over at the purported murder weapon, a troll drumset of rocks, which were also shattered. He could only tell the drumset apart from Kyanite’s body by the colour of the rocks; Kyanite was more bluish. Maybe Valentine did need to read up his geology.

Cleavage planes sounded interesting.27

Valentine looked up and noted, “No gargoyles around.”

The Crow, the club she’d been singing at, was still open, and Valentine and Flavours investigated, while Detritus further examined the body downstairs. The club was up four levels, so the drumset would have had a swift, hard fall, maybe with enough force to plausibly shatter a troll. Valentine carefully questioned the staff and clientele. They seemed even more out of it than he would have expected, no matter how hard they’d been hitting the liquor. None of them remembered anything about what had happened around midnight. Even Daytripper didn’t scramble minds like that.

Meanwhile, Flavours determined that someone had levered up the stage, tilting it up so that the drumset had fallen over and ran down and out the window, destroying a large portion of the wall in the process. That lever action meant that the killer didn’t have to be particularly strong, which only widened the field of suspects.

Detritus sauntered up to the club and did some truly inspired shouting at the staff and club-goers in an attempt to make them remember what had happened around midnight. He succeeded in bewildering and terrifying them, but they still didn’t know what was going on. It was eerie.

No one had a clear motive. Some patrons complained about Kyanite’s singing, but Valentine didn’t get the sense they would have killed over it. He spent a lot of time talking and taking down information, names, and addresses. Everyone had a friend who’d been there around midnight who wasn’t in the club now. Tracking down all of the potential witnesses and suspects was going to take some time.

27 [Didn’t they always?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleavage_\(crystal\))

* * *

Hex kept Mister Stibbons’s schedule, and Hex was willing to share it with DiMA. Hex was generally quite cordial with DiMA. His thinking was a bit alien to DiMA, but so was human thinking, at least equally so. For one thing, of the upcoming Hogswatchnight, Hex insisted that DiMA had to _believe._ The penalty of not believing was nothing less than the sun not rising the next day, according to Hex.

Why was belief in the Hogfather, an anthropomorphic manifestation, so important, compared to belief in any god? Hex’s explanation there was less than convincing, and DiMA doubted he would be invited to any Hogswatchnight parties, but nonetheless, he supposed he had nothing to lose by believing in the Hogfather for a night. That was a contemplation for another time.

Right now, DiMA cornered Mister Stibbons as he was exiting the fourth slood derivative lab, right on time per Hex’s schedule. Hex’s schedule even included what Mister Stibbons was going to say in the minutes of all of his upcoming meetings. It was a bit uncanny. Hex, however, hadn’t told DiMA what Mister Stibbons was going to say when DiMA cornered him in the hallway.

“Mister Stibbons -” DiMA started, planning a polite address.

“Er. DiMA? You submitted a scholarship application. Listing me as a… relative,” Ponder said immediately. “I don’t know that I can refute that, exactly, but it makes me uncomfortable, so we’re both going to agree to never discuss it again.”

DiMA frowned thinly. He didn’t think that Ponder quite understood the tuition difficulties that one could encounter if one did not conform to one of Unseen University’s scholarship categories or did not come from money. However, DiMA wasn’t here about his own problems. He was here about Alf, Xian, Zinon, and poor Chatur who wasn’t even in Ankh-Morpork right now. “If I may table that discussion, I would like to speak with you about the way students are treated.”

“In what sense?” Ponder asked, faintly worried.

Then a white robed student wizard burst out of the lab and said, “We’ve found a fifth slood derivative, but it’s escaping!”

Ponder’s eyes brightened, and he directed, “You just stay out here, DiMA. You would want proper fireproof robes for this,” and he ducked back into the slood lab.

Proper fireproof robes, which DiMA couldn’t afford. DiMA looked down at the scribed-out schedule that Hex had given him. It had updated to say: 5:11 AM: help re-capture fifth slood derivative.

* * *

Vimes had not planned on having a family Hogswatch party.28 The Watch had its own Hogswatch party, complete with the annual tradition of trying to hide the mistletoe from Nobby. Valentine hadn’t been there, busy out actually patrolling, but Vimes had broken into Valentine’s locker and left him a professional-grade set of lockpicks in a black velvet roll. He had wanted to get Valentine a quality crossbow, but it would be too obvious where a genuine Burleigh & Stronginthearm made-to-measure item with polished walnut stock and silver tooling would have come from, and it would have led to uncomfortable questions. A roll of lockpicks was easily and quietly concealed.

The Vimeses usually had a quiet family night in, after, in which Vimes would stay awake to make sure that the Hogfather didn’t try anything funny, what with his breaking and entering and littering act.

However, Shaun had expressed that he wanted a Hogswatch party. Mainly, he wanted it as an excuse to spend more time with Valentine, but he did miss his other Commonwealth friends as well. To Sybil, who was a Lady Who Organized, a small, intimate, last minute Hogswatch party for her son was no trouble. She’d invited over people Shaun knew from the Commonwealth. She’d also tried to invite over some of his school friends, but it had been too short notice for them. However, some of her own swamp dragon fancier friends had come.

Vimes found himself that he couldn’t just go hide in a shadow as he usually did at parties, because many of these people were his own friends, and this was his own family, in his actual house.

Deacon, Vimes could tell, felt out of his depth, because Deacon had been forced to interact and not merely observe. He’d made the mistake of bringing Fluffy the Smooth Deceiver swamp dragon with him, and a pair of interchangeable Emmas were cooing a little over Deacon and more over Fluffy and demanding to know what Deacon was feeding Fluffy.

Vimes personally knew empty beer bottles were included in Fluffy’s diet, based off the times Deacon had dragged Vimes off exploring the underground, and he observed Deacon merely phrased that diet element as ‘enriched glass’ to the Emmas.

Shaun, Nat, and young Sam were playing together. Sybil politely asked Piper where Nat was going to school, to which Piper replied, “Funny thing, not long after we settled in, we received a letter from the Spiteful Sisterhood of Seven-Handed Sek, saying Nat’s tuition was all paid up, so she goes there.”

Vimes was sure he had no idea about that at all.

“Hmm. It’s a decent enough school, I suppose,” said Sybil, looking at Shaun and Nat speculatively.

“She works with Gunilla Goodmountain, Boddony, and the other dwarfs on maintaining the presses, part-time, after school and on the weekends,” added Piper. “She’s adjusted pretty well to Ankh-Morpork.”

Strong wasn’t there; Sybil wanted to focus on _friends_ of Shaun, her interchangeable Emmas aside. Besides, Strong was probably working; Hogswatch meant nothing to him.

Dogmeat had somehow contrived to be there and was enjoying the bowl of sausages that had been put out for him.

Codsworth circulated about, distributing Hogswatch crackers. Vimes’s mother hadn’t been able to afford them, little wrappers of a puff of black powder, a bad joke, and a paper crown, and he didn’t much care for them as an adult, but they entertained the children well enough.

There was the traditional fruit cake, dark, with a density that softly edged into the territory of dwarf battle bread, and glazed over with sickly sweet marzipan. Vimes sipped his mulled grape juice, which did nothing to cut the sweetness of the cake, and he grimaced.

Vimes wished Valentine was here, with him, and not out patrolling the streets of Ankh-Morpork, the gods only knew where. His thoughts drifted gently to Sybil’s comment that no one had stopped loving anyone. Valentine surely wouldn’t love a married man, though… but there Piper was, and really, Valentine’s only objection when Piper had propositioned Vimes had been Piper’s age. Age had been Valentine’s only objection to Preston wanting to court Vimes, too. Maybe Valentine wouldn’t have begrudged Vimes having multiple partners…

But Valentine had that odd religion, which forbid him from so many things that he went ahead and did anyway. Surely, Valentine was happier to be shorn of Vimes?

But Valentine didn’t act happy to have lost Vimes, not really.

The thought occurred to Vimes that he might have quite a bit to apologize to Valentine about, and the thought that always paced inexorably behind caught up with Vimes - that Sybil would leave him, and he couldn’t bear that.

But surely, she wouldn’t leave him just for asking?

28 [He wasn’t planning on it, but the trope was there.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/AVeryBritishChristmas)

* * *

There was snow on the ground, which was mostly brown, and snow in the air, which was getting a head-start by being already yellow from its fall through the smog. High above, a stingwing buzzed, looked speculatively at the pedestrians down below, and was promptly eaten by a gargoyle. A banker was threatening to jump off the Brass Bridge, and he was in a real danger of breaking his neck when his head hit the crust of the River Ankh. Valentine had a rat on his shoulder.

“Game plan, we talk him down, take him back to the station, get him a cup of cocoa, and go from there,” Valentine said, as they walked towards the Brass Bridge, where there was already a commotion. Ankh-Morporkians loved their impromptu street theatre.

“I could probably get a rope around his leg without him noticing,” said Flavours.

“Not a bad idea. Call it Plan B,” said Valentine, when a vision appeared before them.

It appeared as four nested, interlocking wheels of flame, covered in eyes, all of which were uncomfortably fixed on Valentine and Flavours. It spake, “ **Angel, Second Class?** ”

Valentine looked at Flavours and asked, “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Flavours snapped back, “Is there something _you_ ’re not telling _me_?”

“Lots of things!” Valentine said sarcastically, “You don’t even know when my birthday is.”

“Well, same, there’s lots of things I don’t tell you, too! By the way, my birthday is Spune 8, and I like a nice Lancre blue,” sniffed Flavours.

And lo, the blazing wheel spake, “ **Are you not a little angel of vengeance? I understand, this is not a vengeance-specific task, but we’re short-staffed on the holidays.** ”

“I… was being metaphorical when I said that, and I don’t think I was even real at the time,” Valentine admitted, unnerved.

“ **Oh, sod. You have to be more careful about those metaphors. Gods are very literal, you know,** ” primly spake the fiery sphere.

“Uh, which god are we talking, here?” asked Valentine, wearily. There was only one God, and the others were all false idols and demons by another name, but… people here were much like people anywhere, for all that they were pagan, every one of them, even the monotheists. They weren’t evil for their lack of God. If they were evil, they were evil on their own merits.

Maybe the ‘gods’ of the Discworld were really just saints, and it was all a bit confused?

“ **Uhm… he doesn’t exist yet. Clerical filing error. These things happen,** ” spake the somewhat embarrassed wheel, its fire now more of a blush. “ **Look, can you just take this mission?** ”

“What is it?” Valentine asked, thinking about the banker on the bridge that he had to get to.

“ **If you could just talk down the banker Mr. Courtyard, he’s planning on suicide,** ” spake the blaze, and lo, it was unto an inferno.

“We were going to do that anyway!” said Valentine.

“ **Oh. Carry on,** ” it spake, and it vanished.

“Was that weird?” asked Valentine plaintively, who didn’t even know anymore.

Flavours replied, “That was weird.”

* * *

DiMA had arranged to defragment such that he would be unconscious at midnight. He had left out a cup of sherry and some root vegetables. Some time past midnight, he awoke from his defragmentation cycle. DiMA didn’t have the words to discuss what he dreamed about with a human or the other races of Ankh-Morpork, but he could discuss them with Hex, machine to machine. Sometimes, when DiMA defragmented, he had the sense of beings peering at him; Hex told him they were unfathomable beings from another dimension and that DiMA shouldn’t give them any attention. Now, when he saw a rocket baby mobile hanging from the ceiling above him, the sort that had hung above the crib of the Sole Survivor's infant son, DiMA wondered if he was still dreaming.

A tag hung off the mobile, and DiMA read it:

> To: DiMA  
>  From: The Hogfather  
>  Ho ho ho!

The sympathetic magic had worked, then. DiMA had believed, he had made the appropriate offerings, and he had been rewarded with… a baby mobile. He had to think about that.

Well, DiMA was only a few months old, wasn’t he?

* * *

Valentine leaned back in a chair at the Bucket, a glass of beer in his hand. He would have done whiskey, but pouring out a thimbleful of whiskey for Flavours would knock the rat flat on his tush, and Valentine didn’t fancy having to carry a stone-drunk rat back to the Watch barracks to sleep it off. So beer it was for both of them. Nobby also had a beer, a pint of Winkles.

Visit, who had a cup of ‘lemonade’, eyed the beers with righteous disdain. 

“So it turned out Mr. Jorg Courtyard’s uncle, Gwilliam Courtyard, had lost about $8,000 cool from the family loan business, and Jorg figured that was the end of it for him, but Flavours and I just talked to Uncle Gwilly and retraced the last place he’d had the money - at the Royal Bank, and the guard there was one of ours moonlighting, y’know, Wigram? Wigram had seen Gwilly talking to one Mr. Putter, and Gwilly last remembered having the money folded in his newspaper. Gwilly and Putter bumped newspapers, and Putter promptly deposited a cool - you guessed it - $8,000. ‘Course Wigram noticed the flash of cash like that. Anyway, cleared that all up, booked Putter, case closed,” concluded Valentine.

“The wheel of fire was still weird,” added Flavours, sipping at his thimble of beer.

“A wheel of fire?” Visit said seriously. “Ophanim. Celestial guards. They appear before prophets and saints.”

“Tosh, someone probably just set a cart wheel on fire,” said Nobby, “and then nicked the goods off the cart. There’s the profit.”

* * *

Sybil was gently snoring. Vimes was face down in bed, trying to sleep as his mind churned. Sybil had said that no one had stopped loving anyone to reassure Shaun that Vimes wouldn’t stop loving him just because the boy was a synth, but the boy was also angry that he’d lost a father with the ending of the… partnership between Valentine and Vimes.

Of course that had ended. Valentine was good. He wouldn’t court a married man. But maybe Vimes was wrong about that; not about Valentine being good, but about Valentine courting a married man. Valentine was religious. Vimes knew that Valentine considered the physical expression of his love for Vimes to be a sin. But he’d done it anyway, and the Commonwealth seemed to have a different set of ethics with regards to courtship. Monogamy was a negotiated agreement, not an absolute requirement.

If Vimes had been wrong, if Valentine had wanted to continue their partnership, in a romantic sense, at least, then Vimes had been an utter cad in unilaterally terminating their courtship. Surely Valentine would have protested? But Valentine had sort of protested, and then Valentine had given up, as he often did. He would fight for others with an admirable ferocity, but he lacked the sense of self-worth to fight for himself. Vimes knew that about Valentine.

The poor man already had an insecurity complex about being trash, and Vimes had discarded him - out of what he thought was kindness and respect for Valentine’s beliefs, yes, but nonetheless.

Valentine was a clockwork man with glowing eyes, but Vimes was the monster.

Whatever Valentine’s feelings were for Vimes now, Vimes needed to apologize to him, deeply and truly. If Valentine was angry with him, it would be nothing less than he deserved. Valentine might even decide to terminate their friendship entirely; the thought of that was oppressively crushing to Vimes, but whatever it stirred up, Valentine deserved the apology and more.

But what if, and it was a tiny if, the sort of if that wizards would chase down and smack into other ifs at high speeds to see what it was made of, Valentine asked Vimes to again be his lover?

If he asked Sybil for permission, she wouldn’t be angry with him, he was sure. She would be quietly wounded, which was worse, and Vimes always lived in the terror that she would wake up one day, see him for what he was, and leave him. But he had wronged Valentine, and Vimes could not let an injustice stand. If Valentine posed the question of resuming their relationship, Vimes owed Valentine an answer. To be able to answer that hypothetical question, he had to ask Sybil for permission beforehand, despite what he feared of her reaction. Vimes owed Valentine that much. He owed Valentine his own destruction, if that was required.

Sybil awoke mid-night, in the small hours, when Vimes was still ruminating, and kissed him inquiringly. The time between her first and second sleep29 was often a quiet time for reading, editing one of her in-progress treatises on dragons, prayer at her small shrine, or a cuddle-up. After she broke off the kiss, Vimes hesitated in speaking. She deftly observed, “You haven’t slept at all, have you, dear? What’s eating you?”

“Could I apologize to Valentine and ask if he’d like to resume his courtship with me?” Vimes blurted, and he added, “I understand completely, if you’d rather I didn’t and if you’re upset -”

Sybil studied him. “I wondered if you were going to ask me something like this when Havelock removed all those dreadful old laws.” She paused a moment. “Shaun wondered, too. Why do you ask now?”

“Er, you’d said that no one had stopped loving anyone, and I kept thinking about that, and I know that I’m not always the best at, ah, understanding when an understanding is meant to be understood with regards to myself. So it dawned on me that I need to, at the very least, apologize to him for my churlish behaviour, but if he were to forgive me, there is a tiny prospect that he just might desire to resume our courtship,” Vimes rambled. 

Sybil arched a brow. “It really took you that long to realize that he still carries a torch?”

Not ‘ _might_ still carry a torch’. ‘Still carries a torch’. Vimes sputtered, “Yes! Nick’s religious, and his religion doesn’t allow, ah, conjugal relations between men or multiple bedmates, and besides, ah, I made a promise to you, and I’m sure Nick would think less of anyone who put aside a vow made in solemn trust.”

“There is a difference between putting aside and renegotiating terms,” Sybil observed, “and you want to renegotiate terms, don’t you, dear?”

“Ye-es?” Vimes admitted, feeling rather hopeless.

“Have you thought at all about what it might feel like to Nick, you asking him almost three months after?” Sybil asked neutrally.

Vimes groaned and buried his head under a pillow.

“If you had asked me earlier, I would have insisted on monogamy between us, but I’ve grown to be quite fond of Mr. Nick Valentine and how he fits into our household. He reminds me of you, dear. If he still desires to be courted by you, I will give you permission to pursue him, but I would caution you - I do not wish to see him hurt, and I fear he will require a good deal of reassurance for a long time. You have many strengths, my Sam, but courting is not one of them. Please be careful with him,” said Sybil.

“I don’t want to hurt him!” Vimes protested, even as a wave of relief hit him. Sybil wasn’t going to leave him for asking. “I, uhm. Thank you. We have that.... picnic?” What a daft idea, a picnic in the snow, but they’d go, and then Shaun would learn why people didn’t have picnics in the snow. “We can sit down with him, after, and I can ask him then?”

“I suppose that’s a reasonable time to discuss it as adults,” granted Sybil.

29 [We know that Sam didn’t do this, but Sybil probably did.](http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: I know that, as far as the Roundworld UK goes, a man probably can’t inherit a title from another man via marriage, but this isn’t Roundworld. This is Discworld, and the idea of Nick having a title forced on him if he were to marry Sam is funny, and in the end, the rule of funny wins.
> 
> S: I’m always absurdly pleased anytime I can get away with shoe-horning a Weird Al song into the soundtrack (soundtracks are usually A’s domain; she’s much better at finding fitting songs).
> 
> A: Turtle Recall mentions that the Seamstresses' Guild runs the molly houses of Ankh-Morpork. Molly houses aren't per se brothels, though. <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/regency-gay-bar-molly-houses>
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	11. Book ‘Em, Sam * Out of Sight; Into Mind * Honeytrap

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [The End of The World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sonLd-32ns4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=20&t=0s) by Skeeter Davis and [Transcendence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp4VdRh7bwM&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=20) by In Tenebris.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Book ‘Em, Sam * Out of Sight; Into Mind * Honeytrap_

Mort Lake was a lovely spot for a family picnic, with tables and clearly marked portions of the lake that were theoretically swimmable in the summer, though there was ice-skating now, and reasonably safe playgrounds for the children, though even Nick, who couldn’t be poisoned, wouldn’t have licked the slides. The way the paint peeled on some of the playground equipment made him think uncomfortably of lead. In fact, he had pocketed a few paint chips with the thought of taking them to Sergeant Littlebottom. If it was lead, like he was thinking, then what? Organize a volunteer group to repaint the slides? Nick didn’t know, although he bet he could probably get Captain Carrot in on it as the Captain was always looking for more community service projects, and if he could get Carrot in on it, that solved most problems all by itself.

Dogmeat was running about the park and enjoying all the smells. Ankh-Morpork had many smells. There was even a Smell Preservation Society.

Radgulls flew over the lake. Downspout had told Valentine that he quite liked the taste. They were spicier than pigeons.

Right next to the lake, near one of the swimmable areas, Willikins and Codsworth had unfolded a tablecloth on one of the sturdy wooden picnic tables and laid out perfect table spreads with little sandwiches that contained what Sam called a distressing lack of bacon. Then again, Nick was given to understand that Lady Sybil had cut down on Sam’s bacon intake with the best interests of Sam’s health in mind, and when the dame put it that way, Nick sort of agreed with her, though he wouldn’t tell Sam. He wanted that man around for a long time, too.

“It’s not like you ever ate bacon in the first place, to have it taken away from you,” said Sam who sat on the other side of the table with Lady Sybil, when Nick was silent on the matter of the bacon argument, which seemed to be a long-standing discussion between husband and wife. Sam had peeled apart a sandwich and disassembled it into its sorely lacking component parts the way that Shaun had taken apart the music box that Nick had gotten him.

“I’m not walking into that minefield for you,” said Nick, resisting Sam’s attempt to drag him into the argument. Young Sam and Shaun sat on his side of the table.

“But you have walked into a minefield for him?” Lady Sybil asked, with clear interest. She was eating her sandwich properly and appeared, against all odds, to be enjoying it.

“...a few times,” Nick admitted, rubbing the back of his head. The winter sun was bright overhead, shining even through the half-cover of clouds. His outfit was really not appropriate for the season, which was cold, even with the trenchcoat on. Codsworth put a glass of what turned out to be heavily spiked iced tea in front of him, which he drank gratefully. “Thanks, Codsworth.”

“Of course, sir,” said Codsworth, who started to set out the dessert forks for the chilled dragonfruit ‘dessert’ still in the picnic basket.

“There weren’t nearly as many mines outside the Switchboard as I’d been expecting,” said Sam, reluctantly putting his sandwich back together like a man consigned to the gallows.

“Ah. You were expecting more mines. Of course,” said Lady Sybil mildly.

“I have the music box back together,” announced Shaun, who had been fiddling with the pieces instead of eating his sandwich. He’d been fiddling with the pieces, on and off for a few weeks. The music box was a cheap thing that Nick had picked up in the bargain bin of a shonky shop. It had once been able to play a very tinny version of, “Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork”. Shaun wound it up, and now it played, crystal clear, like an old transistor radio:

> _Why does the sun go on shining?_  
>  _Why does the sea rush to shore?_  
>  _Don't they know it's the end of the world?_  
>  _'Cause you don't love me anymore_

Sam rubbed his temples and stared off at an offending tree, which was barren and grey, as trees were supposed to be in Ick, which ultimately made it rather suspect.

“Where did you learn that song, Shaun?” asked Lady Sybil.

“Diamond City radio,” said Shaun proudly. “I could pick it up at the Institute, sometimes.”

Young Sam was eating his sandwich, probably because he didn’t know any better, and watching with fascination some snowflakes falling on the table. Codsworth tried to shoo away a radgull. Willikins looked off at the other park-goers, eyes narrowed. He certainly saw the other picnicker wander nearby with a bottle in hand, as did Nick. There was also a woman with a pram that didn’t contain a baby. Some park goers were wandering around with their fake Pip-Boys, arguing with their imps about their progress in _Aftermath_. There was a tall, slender man, attractive in a delicate sort of way, dressed in purple. He was singing, but Valentine couldn’t hear him.

> _Why do the birds go on singing?_  
>  _Why do the stars glow above?_  
>  _Don't they know it's the end of the world?_  
>  _It ended when I lost your love_

What happened was a simple matter of geometry. The bottle, which contained a yellow liquid that was not a refreshing lemonade, not even in the Deezer sense, ignited, and the picnicker made a grab for young Sam. Lady Sybil grabbed her dessert fork with a reverse grip. Sam leapt across the table. Willikins drew a crossbow. Codsworth’s saw whirred. Nick was closest, sitting next to young Sam, and he clocked the son of a bitch who dared to threaten a child, saw the molotov cocktail come perilously close to the tablecloth and wooden table, and went tumbling with the assailant into the lake, breaking through the icy surface.

> _I wake up in the morning and I wonder_  
>  _Why everything's the same as it was_  
>  _I can't understand, no, I can't understand_  
>  _How life goes on the way it does_

The bottle was doused by the lake, and the assailant smashed it against Nick’s head and buried the shards in his chest, where his heart would have been if he’d had one. Nick didn’t need to breathe, but the assailant, who seemed to be human, did, and he grabbed his head and dragged him under the lake with him. Nick held him for a moment, getting elbowed in the face for his trouble, until the bubbles stopped and the battering movements became sluggish, and then he dragged him out of the lake and onto the shore and planted his heel firmly on the back of the man’s neck, fairly screaming, “You’re under arrest!”

> _Why does my heart go on beating?_  
>  _Why do these eyes of mine cry?_  
>  _Don't they know it's the end of the world?_  
>  _It ended when you said goodbye_

He wasn’t the only one screaming, “You’re under arrest!” as he reached down to grab the man’s hands and haul them behind his back. Nick didn’t carry handcuffs when he wasn’t on duty, and neither did Sam, who had a bloodshot, crazed look to his eyes that Nick didn’t find inappropriate, given the situation, but Willikins had rope. Nick was somehow unsurprised. 

> _Why does my heart go on beating?_  
>  _Why do these eyes of mine cry?_  
>  _Don't they know it's the end of the world?_  
>  _It ended when you said goodbye_

If Lady Sybil had been closer, the man with the molotov cocktail would have, Nick was certain, have taken a dessert fork to the brainstem. If Willikins hadn’t been standing on the other side of the table, watching the woman with the baby pram that contained an ugly little dog and not a baby, the assailant would have had a crossbow bolt through his head. If Codsworth hadn’t been occupied with retrieving the chilled dragonfruit dessert from the picnic basket, the jackass under his heel who had tried to take a molotov cocktail to a kid would have a new split personality courtesy of being sawed in half and set on fire.

If Sam Vimes the avenging father had gotten his hands on the man, he’d be under arrest, just like he was now, for all that the windpipe under his heel begged to be crushed. At least, that was what Valentine believed. Valentine had the treacherous thought that he’d be doing the world a service if he just pushed down a little bit harder with his foot on that windpipe. That was why, even after the end was over and the apocalypse had given way to reclamation, Nick Valentine still loved Sam Vimes. How could he not love a man who was such a human avatar of due process that he’d even arrest a creep who would try to kill his own child?

* * *

Vimes paced. Four officers had arrived promptly. The… suspect, whoever he was, hadn’t resisted arrest. He hadn’t resisted anything. After he’d been restrained by Willikins’s rope, it was like _everything_ had gone out of him. He breathed, but the lights weren’t on upstairs. So they’d taken him back to the station. Cheery had shot an iconograph of him. Soon enough, they’d have posters up about identifying who he was, with a small reward attached. Vimes had learned - attach too large a reward, and people would say anything.

At the Yard, Igorina pronounced the man catatonic. Certain sorts of specialized vampires and other… entities back in Uberwald could manipulate minds like that, she said. Then Igorina admitted pensively that if Commander Vimes gave her a turnip and waited for a big storm, she might be able to pull off something similar.

That conjecture did not fill Vimes with confidence.

Sally was called in and sorted over the suspect’s clothing and checked his body. She didn’t see any fangmarks, and she commented that he didn’t have the pallor she would expect of a vampire thrall. From the smell of his clothes and the general look of them, she suggested that he was probably a tanner, and she wrinkled her nose at that.

Vimes was somewhat inclined to agree. One didn’t need a superhuman nose to smell the astringent dyes the tanners used. Of course, he might have just stolen a tanner’s clothing, the people of Ankh-Morpork knowing the noses of the Watch as they did these days...

He was wearing a cheap, plain brass wedding ring, slightly tarnished with age. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He smelled like he smoked, the general scent of ‘tanner’ aside. If he drank, he didn’t drink enough to smell of it.

Probably not a vampire thrall, no evidence of turnip involvement…

Vimes didn’t want to let the catatonic man in the cell out of his sight, but he looked to Sally and commanded, “Don’t let him escape, and keep me updated.”

“Sir,” she said, and she nodded. There were three other Watchmen with her, and they were good about the cell keys these days.

Vimes paced back to the Yard canteen, where Sybil, young Sam, and Shaun were waiting, along with Valentine, Willikins, Codsworth, and Dogmeat. A number of Watchmen had clustered around them. Young Sam and Shaun were well-distracted. Someone had laid out tea for Sybil. Watchmen always looked after her, but then, she’d looked after them first. Getting Valentine to stay in the canteen had been somewhat difficult, but… well, honestly, even Vimes shouldn’t have been over there as Igorina and Sally assessed the suspect. There was just no one to _keep_ him from being there. Carrot was over at the King’s Way Watchhouse. Detritus was at Nap Hill. 

But Valentine didn’t need to be there as Igorina and Sally assessed the suspect, and Vimes didn’t want anyone saying Valentine had done anything more than necessary force to that suspect. Yes, Valentine had held him underwater, but he’d been breathing when Valentine brought him back up, a dunking didn’t do that sort of thing to a man’s brain...

“Oh, Sam,” said Sybil, brightening slightly. Her hands were trembling as she held her cup of tea.

“Father!” said young Sam and Shaun, although they didn’t break away from listening to one of the dwarf constables, who was talking about his cousin, who made broomsticks.

“I already gave my statement to Reg,” Valentine said, arms crossed.

Willikins and Codsworth stayed quietly in the background.

“N…” Valentine wasn’t in uniform and wasn’t on duty. Vimes hesitated. “What if he’s a synth?”

They’d seen a deathclaw, radroaches, bloatflies, the bloody Stranger, bloodbugs, mole rats, and more, now that they’d been looking for them. More and more incursions were happening. There were even gargoyle Watchmen asking if they could have their pay upgraded from pigeons to stingwings, which had a more satisfying crunch than pigeons. What had they been missing?

Valentine looked away. “Sh… Well. I guess there’s a way to check that. You won’t like it, sir.”

Vimes looked at Valentine, puzzled. “You can’t tell a Generation 3 synth from a human without killing him…”

Valentine suggested, “But he seems wiped, right? So. See if DiMA can print a mind on him, sir.”

Valentine was right; Vimes didn’t like that at all.

* * *

DiMA was trying to talk to Mister Stibbons when Wathen came up behind DiMA and reminded him that there was a stack of customer complaints to deal with, including one that a premium subscriber had been mobbed by trained bears, oh, and one of those bloody Watchmen were asking about DiMA for some reason. Alf was, outrageously by Wathen’s standards, sleeping, and Xian and Zinon were both completely spacey. DiMA feared that they might develop planets.30

He turned to say that no, he _was_ going to talk to Mister Stibbons now, and the complaints could wait, but Mister Stibbons was already both looking and walking away. There was one of those slood lab students calling for Mister Stibbons.

There was a smugly satisfied expression on Wathen’s face.

It dawned on DiMA then that Mister Stibbons was not too distracted to talk. Mister Stibbons was being distracted.

DiMA was going to have to do something about Wathen but not just then. He had too many different problems on his mind, and he thought he might have a partial way of addressing at least one of them, though it required a walk. Stibbons was not the only one being distracted.

30 [A legitimate concern for wizards.](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Planets)

* * *

Igorina let out a low whistle and said, “You know, Valentine is a solid 8 as far as abominations of science go, but DiMA, you’re a 10. Definitely.”

DiMA clearly didn’t know what to think of that, as he shifted his weight awkwardly and then knelt next to the unknown suspect, examining him pensively.

“Not that I’m into that sort of thing, but you’re just the type some of my cousins fancy. You have a clacks address I could give them?” asked Igorina.

“DiMA@uu.edu,” DiMA said hesitantly.

Vimes, who stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall, almost pitied DiMA. Almost. Sally had gone back to other Watch business, leaving Vimes and Igorina and a few other Watchmen at the cells, watching the suspect.

DiMA pulled out some equipment from his schoolboy satchel and set it up around the suspect, who was drooling gently. He had brought with him a baffling array of glassware, glowing widgets, rune-inscribed metalware, and a glass of what looked very much like weak beer.

Vimes wondered how DiMA hadn’t spilled it, and he thought about his own magic bag. Now, he hadn’t exactly seen DiMA take everything out of that bag, had he? Some of those items, DiMA pulled out of seemingly nowhere, like those card tricks he did…

Then DiMA gently touched the man’s head with his left hand. Then he flexed, his metal fingertips digging into the man’s scalp, and he looked over at one of his meters. DiMA said softly, “You asked me if I could print a mind on him, and you asked me if he’s a synth. These are not the same question, Commander Vimes.”

“Explain,” Vimes commanded sharply.

“I could print a mind on him. However, there aren’t any significant biochemical differences between Generation 3 synth brains and human brains. All the fact that I could print a mind on him suggests is that his brain has empty storage space,” said DiMA.

“Human brains don’t just go blank,” Vimes said, although he knew that wasn’t quite right, especially given certain unsettling things said by Igorina and Sally. People fell comatose, didn’t they? They were struck down by the gods… but what god would strike down an actually wicked man, one who would try to harm a child? The gods didn’t care about things like that.

DiMA said carefully, “They might if the wrong sort of elf gets ahold of them, not that there is a correct sort of elf, per se. There is a residual glamour quotient on him, which is indicative of elven magic. Of course, this is puzzling, because the parasite realms inhabited by the elves were recently severed from the Discworld’s plane of existence.”

“You’re suggesting an elf wiped his mind,” Vimes said stonily.

“We didn’t get those much in Uberwald. Couldn’t keep up with the vampires, sir,” said Igorina.

DiMA played around with a piece of thaumaturgical equipment almost entirely unlike a clock and jotted down some notes. “When did this incident occur?”

Vimes told him.

Then DiMA clarified, “Actually, I am suggesting that an elf compelled him to undertake the accused actions and _then_ wiped his mind, based off the half life of sex appeal resons.”

Vimes stared, took in a deep breath, and said, “That’s surely not a thing.”

“I didn’t name them,” DiMA said smoothly. 

An elf. They were a fairytale thing. They didn’t belong in cities. Oh, maybe they stole children out in the country, but in cities, humans did that themselves. Vimes snarled aloud, “And why would an elf do that?”

DiMA said, “Unclear. According to my studies, they usually cause indirect rather than direct harm to children, and I would not wish to speculate on flimsy evidence.” He started to pack up his gear. Vimes watched. DiMA was definitely palming some of it somehow, that shifty bugger. “They do hate iron and to a lesser extent steel. Your standard Watch swords should be effective, if any of your officers should encounter one and retain their wits, which would be rather the key thing, although I am professionally obligated to suggest that a wizard should be summoned for any substantiated elf sightings.”

“Oh, and a wizard would be just so helpful if we cornered an elf, hmm?” Vimes said, glaring.

“I didn’t say a wizard would be _helpful_ ,” DiMA said mildly. “I merely imagine a wizard would like to document why there is an elf in Ankh-Morpork when there shouldn’t be one on this plane at all.”

Vimes sighed heavily. “Bugger.” There was an elf in his city, if DiMA was correct. Incursions from the Commonwealth continued to happen without rhyme or reason. Strange murders still happened at a dribbly pace, and he couldn’t tie them together. Ankh-Morpork continued to be a mess for… whatever the term was that included both people like Vimes and people like Igorina, which wasn’t ‘police’.

He hadn’t gotten around to apologizing to Valentine.

And he needed to go to a parent-teacher meeting for Shaun, because Shaun had started making up homework to do, because his teacher wasn’t assigning him any on the grounds that homework might constrain the native creativity that children possess, and Shaun making up his own homework was upsetting everyone.

Vimes turned to Igorina, “We’ll have someone in to give a briefing on elves. DiMA, is there anyone you’d recommend?”

“I _would_ recommend Mister Stibbons, insofar as he actually published Hex’s results on the sundering of Fairyland from Discworld’s plane, but Mister Stibbons has been highly occupied with other avenues of research recently. I cannot even speak with him myself over a matter of some importance, and I have made multiple attempts,” DiMA said, and he sounded faintly vexed.

“Fine, fine, we’ll look someone up…” Vimes said, irritated. Maybe ol’ Mustrum. He and Vimes were on decent enough terms.

Then DiMA asked, “Would you like me to print a mind on him, Commander Vimes?”

Vimes stared.

DiMA went on, “His body is alive. If I could interview any family, friends, coworkers, employers, or other acquaintances, I could likely produce a reasonable facsimile of his personality, if his next of kin would be agreeable, and he could rejoin society as a productive member.”

Igorina said happily, “Oh, my cousin Igor’s just going to love you to pieces.”

“...I would prefer not,” DiMA said guardedly. 

“He’d put you back together,” said Igorina.

“Still,” said DiMA.

Vimes thought through it from several angles, and he didn’t like any of them. He said aloud, “Is there any point in punishing someone who isn’t there anymore, when he might not have even done it willingly?” The answer to that had to be _no_.

“And it’d be a shame to let a strong, healthy body go to waste,” said Igorina. “Of course, I could always put in a spare brain. I’ve got a few in jars.”

Vimes pinched the bridge of his nose and gritted out, “ _If_ you can find his next of kin and _if_ they agree without any compulsion, DiMA, you can… print a mind on him. Igorina, you were going on a patrol to see if you could find them for questioning? Take our… expert here with you, if he’ll go.”

* * *

It was a testament to the determination of the people of Ankh-Morpork that, despite the tireless crackdown by the Thieves’ Guild, it continued to have a criminal underbelly, which had produced such notables as the late Mrs. Lilywhite. People gave Heliotrope whatever he wanted, even if they didn’t have it to give, but what he had realized was that people would give him money to make people disappear, which was something he would have done anyway for free. They didn’t like it when he called them on what they really wanted, reading their minds, such as when he said, “Ah, yes, you’d actually like me to messily murder your ex-wife, and you’re too cheap for an Assassin.”

The would-be widower had tried to hush Heliotrope, worrying, “Don’t say that. The men in black don’t like freelance contractors.”

Heliotrope smiled beatifically. “I’m not concerned about them.”

But then a very strange man called Tektus, who had almost nothing in his head, no more memories than a very small child but more anger than a grown man needed, had tried to hire Heliotrope for something _different_. He wanted the location of an object out of a man’s head, which was quite easy for Heliotrope, but first, he wanted the man to suffer.

Heliotrope rather enjoyed suffering. He’d agreed purely on those general grounds. Humans were so much more creative at coming up with ways at making other humans suffer. Elves just hurt humans in front of other humans and lied to them, and that became tiresome after a while.

No, this Sam Vimes human was a sort of human who enforced order on other humans, and it would drive him _mad_ , said Tektus, for someone to threaten Vimes’s child and for the ‘crime’ to make no sense. So Heliotrope played along. It had sounded like grand fun.

Vimes’s mind was a bit difficult to peer into; he wasn’t the only inhabitant of his head, and there was an implacable shadow with a lantern, which followed at an inexorable pace, who looked right at Heliotrope when he looked in, the void staring back at him. The three machines were too alien to bother with. The mother and the butler, however, were easy to read. Even standing far afield, Heliotrope could tell those two would never let a hair be harmed on the little boy’s head.

So he’d handed a Molotov cocktail to a passing tanner and sent him into the fray and cheerily watched the chaos. Then he’d wiped the man’s mind with a song, which wasn’t music at all, and he’d walked away.

Heliotrope wondered what would be next.

* * *

“Valentine, your brother wears a dress,” said a youngish human Watchman.

DiMA saw his brother, Shaun, Codsworth, Lady Sybil, young Sam, and the butler - his name was Willikins, wasn’t it - in the canteen of the Yard, with some Watchmen clustered around them in a casually nonchalant fashion.

“What’s wrong with that, Fittly?” asked Igorina, in a deliberately innocent voice.

Humans and a number of other sapient species on the Discworld tended to gender clothing, but wizards wore robes, and if DiMA wasn’t a wizard, a robe was a sight easier to pull on over the exposed scaffolding of his legs than trousers would be. People became upset if DiMA didn’t wear anything, even if there wasn’t anything to be upset about.

“I’m glad you’re still getting use out of that robe I had tailored for you,” said Lady Sybil.

There was an interesting way that the other loitering Watchmen turned to look at Fittly. Clearly, Lady Sybil carried some weight with them.

“What, jealous that he makes it look good?” Valentine said flippantly. “DiMA, the creep S- Commander Vimes asked you about, is he…?”

“I don’t think so,” said DiMA.

“Hnn. You doing all right? Ever get that talk with Mister Stibbons?”

“...no. He has been indisposed,” DiMA paused. “I believe I will try to speak with the Archchancellor.”

The Archchancellor was also busy, and most of the wizards seemed to be at least a little bit afraid of Ridcully, but DiMA was designed to be the sort of person who could neutrally negotiate with people who would seriously contemplate destroying a third of the island in a nuclear explosion. Talking to the Archchancellor was the next logical step.

“You two can gab later. Though Valentine, why didn’t you tell me you brother’s so… singular?” asked Igorina.

“Erm, whatever floats your boat, I suppose,” said Valentine, looking visibly uncomfortable.

DiMA took a good, long look at Shaun across the room, as the boy stood up, gesturing about something. Accounting for distance and the shoes he was wearing, Shaun was taller, by DiMA’s calculations. Not by much, merely in keeping with the growth that would be expected of an 11 year old boy over the span over a few months, but nonetheless, DiMA was fascinated. Shaun shouldn’t have been able to grow at all.

Valentine, Lady Sybil, Shaun, and young Sam looked like a lovely family together. It was a shame they weren’t.

DiMA followed along after Igorina, who started out down Pons Bridge, with the intent of going through the Shambles, an area that included Cockbill Street, the Cattle Market, and Whopping Street. Most of the tanners lived and worked along there. They talked as they walked, Igorina commenting that she’d come to Ankh-Morpork from Uberwald with Mister Vimes years ago. She didn’t like the old Igor ways of lisping and faithfully serving a master, while paying no mind to said master’s morality, and Ankh-Morpork was a place where she could really be herself, which appeared to be made out of the best parts of multiple other people.

Along Cockbill Street, Igorina commented that Mister Vimes had been born and raised there. It was a poor but clean area, with whitewash on the houses and skinny children out playing hopscotch on the cobbles with each other. In fact, three children were using a fourth child as the hopscotch puck. Igorina stopped methodically at each house, asking if anyone knew of the man pictured on her iconograph. Eventually, one young man said the man was Rube Sims, who lived down the way on Whopping Street, saying they were coworkers at a tannery on Tanners Lane. He looked at both Igorina and DiMA with open suspicion and promptly closed the door on them, muttering under his mouth.

As they walked off, Igorina looked to DiMA and said, “You’ll get that sort of thing a lot.”

“I may have noticed,” DiMA said dryly.

“Ankh-Morpork’s a great melting pot. It all melts and goes to pot,” said Igorina. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful place, but it’s… tricky, when you’re different.”

“It always is,” DiMA said faintly.

The Cattle Market was a riot of smells and slaughter. DiMA saw more golems, trolls, and goblins there than he did in other places, but humans remained the dominant species. They checked in at the tannery, where Igorina carefully asked questions about what Rube Sims was like. Again, the master tanner seemed to be hesitant to talk to her. If she didn’t have the Watch badge and the Watchman’s uniform, DiMA didn’t think the master tanner would have talked to her at all.

Rube Sims was an average employee with no strong ambition. He worked for the money, with no passionate love of what he did. His father had been a tanner, and his sons would be tanners after him. His daughters would probably marry tanners. So it went.

They found what now two sources said was his home, down an alley off Whopping Street. A thin, harried-looking woman opened the door and looked ready to close it on Igorina, if only she were given the opportunity. Four children peeked around behind her.

Mrs. Sims wanted to know why the Watch wanted to know about her husband, expression suspicious. Igorina said smoothly that her husband had been involved in an incident and was now indisposed.

Something brittle about her seemed to break. Mrs. Sims said, eyes downcast, “Oh gods, when an Igor comes to the door, you always expect the worst, and…”

From what his employer had said and from what his wife now said, Rube Sims didn’t have any extreme political leanings. He didn’t have strong opinions on the Watch one way or the other, Mrs. Sims said, though DiMA could see she was holding back on saying that the Watch were shifty buggers. Mrs. Sims was, of course, presenting the best version of her husband to the pair of strangers, which was only natural, but Mr. Sims didn’t sound like the sort of man who would take a Molotov cocktail to a child.

DiMA suspected he might take a leather belt to his own children, though.

Finally, Igorina looked to DiMA and nudged him, and he asked softly, “If your husband could have a mind again, even if it wasn’t the one he had before, is that something you think he would want for himself?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Sims said sharply. “Someone has to pay the rent money, and I don’t make enough doing laundry. We’ll all be out on the streets without him.” 

DiMA and Igorina nodded to each other. Then went off walking again to talk to a few of his other known confederates, who all painted the same picture of an average man, just getting by. As they walked, Igorina said, “Does your Geiger counter work, by any chance?”

“Yes. Why?” said DiMA.

“Valentine’s Geiger counter is broken. I can’t get it calibrated. I was hoping if I borrowed the Commander’s Pip-Boy and you, we might be able to figure out some known rad levels off troll drugs - they’re radioactive, turns out - and get Valentine’s Geiger counter recalibrated,” said Igorina.

“I would certainly be willing,” said DiMA. “I would do almost anything for Nick.”

On the way back, DiMA started to hear clicking. He paused and listened, _really_ listened to what was actually there, which was something he was working on. A neon - no, _magic_ sign buzzed faintly overhead, pink lights flickering in the dark.

“What’s wrong?” asked Igorina.

“There’s something radioactive underground,” said DiMA. That wasn’t inherently something wrong. Radioactivity was a part of nature. A natural nuclear fission reaction could even occur as an emergent process in a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions occurred. However, DiMA was used to the normal level of background radiation in Ankh-Morpork, and this sounded like more than he was expecting.

“Drug smugglers down in the tunnels, maybe,” speculated Igorina.

“It’s moving up,” said DiMA, stepping off into a side alley.

Something massive, about the size of a Vertibird, broke loose from underneath the cobbles. It _screamed_ , and windows blew out, glass shattering down to the streets.

“Looks like a bat crossed with a noble dragon… feels like Uberwald,” said Igorina. She blew her whistle and pulled out her set of whitle paddles to signal to the nearby clacks tower.

DiMA had figured out the various clacks encryption schemes currently in use long ago. She was calling for backup. He corrected, “It’s a scorchbeast.”

He felt rather terribly guilty. DiMA had done render work on scorchbeasts. They were a new game asset. He knew that Valentine had requested select game screenshots, because various Commonwealth incursions had been appearing in Ankh-Morpork, but scorchbeasts weren’t Commonwealth!

“Mind the scream. You may contract a, er… plague,” DiMA mumbled.

“Me? Contract a plague? More like a plague would contract me,” said Igorina, drawing her crossbow, as both of them tried to figure out what to do about the giant beast now winging up over the street.

A cloud of radioactive gas released under the monster, and DiMA’s Geiger counter shrieked at him. Igorina got off a good shot with her crossbow, though she seemed obviously disappointed by the lack of results as the creature screamed back at her, hardly phased. She held her head for a moment, then reloaded.

DiMA picked up a disturbed cobble and threw it, and the scorchbeast darted down, snapping at him. He narrowly threw himself out of the way.

“Bloody hells, DiMA. Your brother got in between a fight with two trolls, and now you’re picking a fight with a dragon? What’s with you synths?” said Igorina, firing her second shot.

“Scorchbeast, not dragon,” DiMA corrected again, and if he survived, he would explain that he happened to feel very personally responsible for this particular situation. It was absolutely nothing to do with the fact that his Combat AI package was set to 'Aggressive', he told himself firmly. He was gripped by a rather visceral sense of horror about what might happen if this particular scorchbeast was a diseased scorchbeast. He chucked another cobble at it.

The cobble bounced harmlessly off the beast, which lashed into a building, tearing off the fourth floor and sending it and the inhabitants crashing down to the cobbles as DiMA and Igorina scrambled out the way. DiMA had a moment of horror, not much at the blood on the street, but to his shame, over the building itself coming apart. Game physics engines handled a fair approximation of gratuitous blood, but they didn’t account for the buildings coming apart any moreso than they were already damaged. Why didn’t they account for that? Why did DiMA feel like he was used to seeing someone’s head come off but get hung up over walls collapsing as the scorchbeast slammed into a second and third building?

Now the scorchbeast wasn’t the only thing screaming, as bystanders were injured as casually and carelessly as ants underfoot

“Verdammt!” Igorina swore, checking on an unmoving figure trapped under a rotten old oak beam.

The scorchbeast paused, coiled atop a fourth building, and then bellowed back down at Igorina. She might have been the best of several humans, but the screams, the radioactive mist, snapping teeth, and lashing claws were clearly getting to her. 

The wails, teeth, and claws were getting to DiMA, too, even if the mist didn’t do much.

“So you’ll let a scorchbeast take you apart, but you won’t let an Igor?” Igorina teased, clearly trying to keep her spirits up, despite the situation.

They weren’t going to last. But if they didn’t do something, who would?

If DIMA ever made it back to Unseen University, he was _definitely_ increasing the timer between successive Sonic Scream volleys to 10 seconds for Scorchbeasts and the Scorchbeast Queen in order to reduce the frequency of these attacks to help players have more time to react between Sonic Scream volleys. This fight was far more nightmarishly difficult than he’d been envisioning.

A few other Watchmen, two dwarfs and a human, arrived, and they also shot at the scorchbeast with their crossbows. It was too little. Scorchbeasts were meant to be the sort of challenge where one might resort to missiles.

Out of the corner of his eye, DiMA saw Death sitting there on a bench, as if he was patiently waiting for someone. DiMA blinked, feeling feverish. Death was still there, black robes, skeleton, scythe, and all, with two blue pinkprick eyes like stars in the void of infinity.

DiMA looked to the pink magic sign and up to a heavy stone decoration atop one of the buildings. The scorchbeast needed to go down and a bit to the right, so that the Watchmen could actually get in with their swords, and if something was going down, that meant that something else had to go up, according to the Law of Conservation of Reality. The pink magic sign winked out. The scorchbeast was forcibly grounded into the street, down and right. The stone decoration went up, in a parabolic arc, accounting for wind resistance, and as the Discworld’s odd sort of gravity took effect, fell heavily on the scorchbeast’s neck.

As DiMA stared, trembling, Death walked over to the scorchbeast, said a few words to the animal that DiMA couldn’t hear, raised the scythe, and winked out. DiMA collapsed to his knees, and his attention drifted to the ticking countdown number at the edge of his vision. Across the street, Igorina sagged down, clutching her side, but she was reassuring the dwarfen officer, “I’ve got a shpare shpleen back on ice at my lab. I’ll be right ash rain. Now, get me over to that man trapped under the rubble, I’ll have to put him on pump...”

She didn’t like lisping, she’d said. Stress, DiMA decided.

The human officer looked at the dead scorchbeast and said, “Betting pool on whether or not Captain Carrot chews us out for not arresting it?”

“Not taking that bet,” grunted one of the dwarfs.

DiMA felt shaky, but he forced himself to his feet, and he examined the dead scorchbeast. Not a diseased model, he didn’t think, which was a small mercy. Buildings all around were still damaged, and he wouldn’t be shocked if there were wounded inside… “...ah, that mist is radioactive, by the way. A sort of poison. You’ll need appropriate chemical countermeasures.”

“You shure know a lot about it,” said Igorina, proving once again that all half-decent police were suspicious bastards.

“I suppose I do,” DiMA admitted. “I helped design it.”

* * *

A set of coded responses and actions were mapped into a real, if battered, flesh-and-blood body and as the form of the thing influenced the reality of the thing, so this thing became real. The body woke up in an alley, which was a familiar feeling. Although the body had never truly woken up anywhere, he thought he had woken up in alleys plenty of times. The feel of cobblestones beneath him was also familiar, as was the general grunginess of his environment, but that was where the familiarity ended. The place smelled... well, he wouldn't really say it smelled better or worse than what he was used to, but it was certainly different. The buildings were mostly in better shape than he remembered, but the styles were all wrong. The real kicker, though, was just how extraordinarily _busy_ the street that the alley he was in looked out to. There were crowds of people all over the roads, all blithely going about their day in exactly the way you didn’t when you were expecting an attack by raiders or super mutants.

As if the people weren’t strange enough (and some were very strange – he saw a large number of rather short people that he would have passed off as being children except for the beards), the street was also full of carts, carts drawn by actual horses, a creature he didn’t remember ever seeing in his life but could recognize from statues and pictures. And not a one of those horses had two heads! Wait, no, he had thought too soon, there was a horse a bit further down the street drawing an ornately decorated black cart and it had two heads. Still, the percentage of two-headed hooved mammals around was still a lot lower than he was made to expect, seeing as brahmin and radstags sported two heads at pretty much a one-hundred-percent rate.

As he was picking his tri-corner hat off the cobbles and trying to remember just _what_ he might have taken that would have led to a hallucination like _this_ , he spied… was that Nick Valentine? Wait, no, although it looked to be a heavily modified Gen 2 synth of a similar age and wearing a… was that a dress? Whatever its story was, it couldn’t still be under Institute control, or else it wouldn’t be calmly walking down a crowded street alongside a stunning young woman in what distantly resembled Roman armor.

He was about to approach the synth to see if he couldn’t get some sort of explanation as to what the hell was going on when an enormous creature, like some sort of dragon, burst out of the middle of the road, knocking over a cart and sending cobbles everywhere. The woman that the synth had been walking with, whom he now noticed had two thumbs on her right hand, responded by blowing a whistle and then waving a pair of white paddles at some point in the distance. He went for his trusty shotgun but found it missing. He hissed a curse under his breath, or at least tried to, but the word wouldn’t come out. Meanwhile the woman and the synth tried to fight the monster with a… crossbow? and thrown cobblestones.

The monster tore into a building, sending chunks of wood, masonry, and even people spilling to the ground. One landed near him, hurt and with an obvious broken leg, but alive. The victim, a middle-aged woman, started pulling herself to cover, and the observer rushed out to help her. ‘Hallucination’ was still the best explanation for this nonsense, but on the off chance that this was all really happening, he couldn’t just stand by and let that woman get killed by some flying monster.

He picked her up and carried her back to the alley. “Thanks. Bloody dragons,” she grumbled in an accent closer to Whitechapel’s than to one used by any human he’d ever met. “Glad to see the Old Sam is already dealing with it,” she added as three people, two of them very short and all of them dressed similarly to the beautiful woman with two thumbs on her right hand, came running towards the mess. Like the woman, they used crossbows, and their bolts seemed just as ineffective as hers had been. Then, without warning, the monster went crashing into the ground and a heavy piece of masonry fell on its neck.

He blinked in surprise. “Well, that was lucky,” he observed, then he turned back to the woman. “Hey, you okay?”

“Well, been better,” she admitted. She looked him over. By her expression, she wasn’t very used to dealing with people who looked like him, but she didn’t seem particularly frightened or disgusted, either. “Look, I don’t mean to impose since I know you already risked your neck helping me out of that, but you think you could help me to the Balancing Monks?”

“Balancing. Monks?” he repeated back to her, not sure if he’d heard that right.

“Yeah, hospital over on the Pitts, not too far from here, at least as long as you’re walking and not crawling.”

He chuckled. “Sure, but I’ll need you to point the way,” he said, picking her up.

“I can do that. Just head down rimwards and the Pitts is the first major left.” Luckily she was pointing, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell what direction she had meant by ‘rimwards’.

The people in armor – had she called them ‘the Old Sam’? and the synth were busy dealing with their own mess, and none of them noticed him as he carried the woman down the street. She chatted, “So new in town, are you?”

“I… guess you could say that,” he said uncertainly. He still couldn’t figure out how he got there, or where ‘there’ was, or even if he really was ‘there’. Sure, it all felt real, but that was enough cause for suspicion – it felt far realer than any real he had ever felt before, and if that didn’t say, ‘really strange trip’, nothing did.

“Hah! I figured, from the accent. Couldn’t really place it. So, what, folks where you from have a problem with zombies? I hear a lot of places aren’t as accepting of undead as we are.”

‘Zombie’ was typically viewed as an insult, and even if he occasionally made a joke about it, wasn’t that his right? But ‘undead’? That was pretty unusual. She didn’t give any indication that she knew she had just used a slur, though, and if you replaced ‘zombies’ with ‘ghouls’ you pretty much summed up the problem with where he was originally from. “I guess you could say that,” he answered carefully.

“Sorry to hear about that, but I wouldn’t worry too much about it. This is Ankh-Morpork! We’ll accept about anyone as long as they know how to play nice!”

He grinned, taking the turn she had indicated earlier. “Well, that’s just what I like to hear.”

* * *

“And how is _my_ project coming along?” asked Lady Rust.

“The little rascals have the Mark 2s done and working, m’lady,” said Wathen.

“I’ll see one right away.”

Nothing Wathen could say would deter her from it, so he ended up taking her to that little hovel of a laboratory, which didn’t even have proper green smoke or cauldrons. He did note that the levels of leftover snack food were severely depleted. If he didn’t know better, Wathen would say the boys had tried to clean up the place. The Dolly Sisters boy, the Auriental boy, and the one Ephebian boy were there, although the Dolly Sisters boy was suspiciously well-rested, probably slacking off. The Klatchian boy had, of course, scarpered. The other Ephebian boy was up to devilry, no doubt.

Lady Rust looked around the laboratory, and the boys acted as if they’d never seen a woman before, so Wathen took the Mark 2 off one to show her. Women were, of course, stupid, inferior creatures who would ruin a wizard’s magic, but that was no reason to fear them.

Rust played around with the prototype, immediately figuring out how to open it up and strap it on, and she said, “They even made it look like a Pip-Boy 2000. Much less bulky than the Mark 1s. Very clever.”

“My idea,” said Wathen, who didn’t know what a Pip-Boy was.

Then Rust looked at one of the childish posters that the boys had hung up, and Wathen immediately barked out, “Tear that thing down. It’s unprofessional.”

Rust, however, asked, “Can you print other stills like that?”

“Sure?” Alf said, hesitantly, as if this was a test and he was being graded.

Rust looked at the three rapscallions, and she said, “You’d be from Dolly Sisters, he’s at least on the Circle Sea… you there, were you born here, or are you from the Counterweight Continent?”

“How could you tell?” Xian said sarcastically. “Is it the fabulous pearwood staff banded with octiron, which you never see here because you people don’t even know how to grow trees?”

“Young man, you will -” Wathen started to warn.

“You will assist me with printing some iconographs of stills from… Commander Vimes’s run of the game,” said Rust brightly, “Wathen, go and take the other two… just take them.” She waved a hand dismissively.

* * *

Xian eyed Lady Rust blearily. He was sick half to death with lack of sleep, but he could tell that she was trying, very hard, to be sweet, and he distrusted that immensely.

“Ankh-Morpork must be so confusing for you,” she said.

“Not really. You just follow the money, and it all makes sense,” Xian said bluntly, as he queued commands into Hex. He blinked a few times and checked his syntax. Unclosed bracket? _Argh._ Sure, Xian could just talk to Hex, but for some operations, code was still a more efficient means of interacting with the mainframe.

“Hmm. Not wrong,” Rust admitted. “Still, it must be all so different to you.”

“Different. Yes. That was sort of the idea,” Xian muttered.

She looked at a still of a clipping error, which made Vimes appear as if he were halfway stuck in a wall, and she said, “That’s rather amusing,” in a humorless sort of way.

“We thought so at the time,” Xian said gloomily.

Of a still of Vimes splattered with blood and standing over a deathclaw, Rust said, “Violent piece of work, hmm?”

Xian thought about how Lady Rust’s Sole Survivor had tried industriously to figure out a way to nuke Sanctuary. “You would be the expert.”

Rust looked over Xian’s desk and even at the stills that he’d carefully cut into hearts, including Preston Garvey/Nate, Cait/Curie, Sarah Lyons/Paladin Danse, Z2-47/X9-27, and Deacon/Arcade Gannon. She asked, “Why do you have all these pictures of... couples?”

“Because it’s fun to think about how fictional characters interact with each other,” Xian said firmly. He refused to be embarrassed. He was in Ankh-Morpork, thousands of miles away from Bes Pelargic. No one was going to arrest him. If people thought he was being weird, that was _just fine_. He was a wizard. He was entitled to be weird. “That, and Preston Garvey/Nate is my favourite romantic relationship out of that game.” Maybe if he talked very loudly about his interests, the noble lady would go away, and Xian could return to staring blankly at the wall while fantasising about sleep.

“There were romantic relationships in the game?” Rust said, blinking slowly, like a snake.

“Plenty!” Xian said. 

“Did Vimes pursue any?” Rust asked.

“Ugh. His Sole Survivor hooked up with Nick Valentine,” Xian said, rubbing his eyes and feeling like ants were crawling under his skin, instead of through Hex, “and that was a horrible relationship. Nick Valentine deserved better. Zinon never should have coded that romance modification.”

“Nick Valentine,” Rust repeated carefully.

“Yes. ‘But they’re both detectives,’ Zinon says. ‘They both love justice,’ Zinon says. ‘They’d make _perfect_ partners,’ Zinon says. Zinon is _wrong_. Vimes doesn’t even have legs for seconds, let alone legs for hours,” Xian ranted. His brain felt fuzzy. Why was he ranting about a poorly written romance to some woman? To be fair, he’d rant about it to anyone who would listen, but people didn’t usually listen.

“Could you print some stills of Commander Vimes and Nick Valentine?” asked Lady Rust. “Possibly… intimately engaged?”

“Ugh. Zinon got to you, didn’t he? Fine, if it’ll make you go away,” said Xian, his second thoughts pestering him. There was all the trouble he’d get into back home, if anyone found his writing journals, his second thoughts nagged. His second thoughts wanted to connect that to handing Lady Rust a handful of iconographs of Vimes and Valentine kissing, but his lack of sleep refused to let him connect those thoughts together.

* * *

“I just wanted to be helpful,” said DiMA, in the tone of someone who had lent his neighbour a cup of flour when asked.

“How in the hells is putting a bloody murderous bat-dragon in my city helpful?” Vimes demanded. “Just last week, we had that army of feral Codsworths!31 Watchmen were triple-shifting, trying to shut them all down, and Codsworth is still too embarrassed about it all to come out of the house without at least half the family along to reassure him.”

Another bloody dragon. Another three people dead. Twelve years ago, and that toll would have been higher. Aside from Igorina, who had been taken down to her laboratory, the injured had been taken to the Balancing Monks and the Lady Syb. DiMA was sitting down across from him in his office, with a pair of dwarf officers behind DiMA, just in case. Possibly in case DiMA tried anything. Possibly because a nasty little piece of Vimes was hoping DiMA would try something.

“That part isn’t,” DiMA admitted, “but it was also wholly unintentional. Lady Rust requested that an icono-game be made for her, and it was assigned as homework for Alf, Chatur, Zinon, and Xian, and they are… acquaintances of mine, so I wished to be of assistance to them, which is how I initially was drawn into the matter. The game is now _Aftermath_ , and you see people with their faux Pip-Boys, playing it. Alf made the suggestion of adding a dragon-like creature to the game, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Why was this _always_ the problem with DiMA?

“The icono-game that I was trapped in. You lot tried to get it running again? You used it as the basis for _Aftermath_?” Yes, Vimes had seen the prats with their fake Pip-Boys, walking into walls. Young Sam and Shaun had asked for them for Hogswatch, but he and Sybil had gotten them velocipedes instead. “Stibbons said it was going to be scrapped!” Vimes snapped, furious.

“Mister Stibbons may have changed his opinion on the matter,” DiMA said carefully. “Nick had mentioned that some elements from the Commonwealth had been encountered in Ankh-Morpork and had requested some iconographs of stills from the game so that the Watch could better recognize Commonwealth… incursions, for lack of a better term. I understand that you are upset at me, Commander Vimes -”

“Three. People. Dead. Because you had to play around with _nonsense_ ,” Vimes snarled, “and that’s not even taking into account the feral Codsworths and the time some Generation 2 synths got eaten by trolls -”

“- you do not understand how upset I am at myself, Commander,” said DiMA, who had looked up what commands he needed for a full reset and had spent some time staring at them, wishing he could be anyone other than himself, “Do what you will with me, but please humor me on this one thing. Show me your officers’ reports on sightings? At least the dates.”

“And why should I do that?” Vimes asked. “Why should I do anything other than have Constable Minegranite there book you?”

Anything that threatened the stability of the city could be considered a capital crime to Vetinari. Having a hand in creating a bat-dragon that wrecked up a few buildings would surely qualify, whether or not Vetinari cared about the dead. 

“I think there is a pattern I should have been seeing,” said DiMA. “If I am correct, it will affect your management of the situation. If I am wrong, a set of dates will hardly enable me to escape from your cells.”

Vimes turned that over in his head. Grudgingly, he looked over his folder of Commonwealth incursions and wrote out the dates. Vimes didn’t see any pattern to it. He held up the piece of paper where DiMA could see.

“Yes. I should have seen this pattern sooner,” DiMA said sadly, “Accounting for the fact that some incursions may have been noticed after the fact and that some incursions may not have been noticed at all, every incursion was preceded by a major build test or update rollout for Lady Rust’s _Aftermath_. Alf was running a build test this morning, which includes new elements such as scorchbeasts. Then we saw a scorchbeast appear in the city. Once something is done, it becomes easier for it to be done again. Once the wizards brought all of us over, I would speculate that it became easier for other icono-game entities to manifest in Ankh-Morpork. Indeed, it would explain why the snack levels have seemed to be low. I thought it was just Xian and Zinon being hungry because they can’t sleep...” 

No, the snack levels were low because they were being transmuted into game assets. If they checked, DiMA was certain they would find the spare furniture store low.

“Things are showing up because you’re running that bloody game again, and new things are showing up because you’ve been adding new things?” Vimes summarized, trying not to think too deeply about DiMA’s comments about the snack foods.

“So I would speculate,” said DiMA.

“Shut it down,” said Vimes. He hated games. He wanted to say this was why he hated games, but no, this was new. 

DiMA gave Commander Vimes a weary look and said, “...placing aside the fact that I am not at liberty to do so, I should make it clear that Xian and Zinon will not stop work because they _cannot_. They are cursed. I haven’t been able to get ahold of Mister Stibbons to inform him. Failing other options, I was going to talk to the Archchancellor.”

Vimes blinked. “They can’t not work on it?”

“Alf and I were similarly cursed, but Nick assisted in breaking the curse on me, and I believe Alf consulted his mother on the matter,” DiMA said, shrugging.

Vimes had thought that leaving DiMA at Unseen University was a… reasonable idea, out of a large set of bad options. Certainly, Vimes didn’t want Vetinari getting his hands on DiMA, and that thought had factored into his estimation. Wizards could look after themselves. They had to be able to, or they ended up as piles of dust in pointy boots. Now Vimes felt a pang of guilt. Yes, he knew that magic mishaps happened, but… “You were forced to work on this icono-game?”

“Eventually. At first, I did want to help Alf, Chatur, Zinon, and Xian. But Lady Rust wanted more progress, and Mister Stibbons was busy. So Mister Wathen, the Professor of Percussive Morale, offered to oversee.” DiMA made an expression of distaste. “He has a tendency towards using ‘fluences and curses, which are in clear violation of University lore, which is why I wanted to report him to Mister Stibbons.”

This was why Vimes hated magic. Every now and then, people talked about magicing people to follow the law. What then would happen when people were magiced to follow bad laws?

“You know my natural inclinations towards people who would enslave people I care about, Commander Vimes,” DiMA said mildly.

Damn DiMA’s inclinications, Vimes knew his _own_ inclinations towards anyone who would enslave anybody. He wouldn’t have tried to talk to Ponder, with an option to talk to Mustrum if he couldn’t get ahold of Ponder. There wouldn’t have been talking involved at all. 

Why had DiMA led with ‘I helped design it’, as opposed to, ‘a group of student wizards has been forcibly dragooned into a project unsafe even by wizarding standards, and I can’t get ahold of a suitable Faculty member to deal with this’? Granted, that was exactly the sort of thing DiMA did, like the time he left a program with death projections just lying around. He went and made himself look terrible, even when he _wasn’t_ up to anything.

“I know Mustrum - Archchancellor Ridcully. We’ll go talk to him.” 

31 [Vimes tends to view berserk robots as “feral”, and since the most prominent example of a Mr Handy that Ankh-Morpork is familiar with is now Codsworth...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3sEwDFSvYA)

* * *

“Tea, Sam?” Ridcully offered.

Vimes took it, because there was also cream and sugar, and it gave him something to do with his hands. He wasn’t angry, precisely, with Ridcully, but if Vimes was responsible for a city of a million people and more in the suburbs, Ridcully could mind a university of a few thousand wizards. “Mustrum, there was a bat-dragon-thing that killed three people, injured nine, and knocked down four buildings because of a student wizard project gone wrong, and I’m going to have to explain this to the Patrician. I would like to be able to explain to him that it’s been dealt with.”

DiMA was out in the hallway. However cocky DiMA was about curbsiding people for unsettling philosophical discussions, someone who existed somewhere in the nebulous space between thaumaturgist and magician couldn’t curbside the Archchancellor. Vimes could.

Ridcully started, “I can send some lads out loaded up with fireballs -”

“The bat-dragon-thing is dead. My officers tell me that it fell to ground, a stone flew off a nearby building, likely due to its thrashing, and slammed down on its neck,” Vimes said coolly. “I want the student project dealt with. It’s pulling incursions into Ankh-Morpork - mutant insects, angry giant reptiles, the bloody Mysterious Stranger -”

“Pardon?” asked Ridcully.

Vimes would have described the Mysterious Stranger as a ‘shifty murdering bastard’, but that would have described a significant portion of Ankh-Morpork, even now. He looked down at his hands. “The process that gave me a body. It’s giving other things bodies, as long as they keep messing around with that bloody icono-game. It needs to be shut down.”

Ridcully shook his head. “It’s like the Moving Pictures again. Only, there is a delicate issue. Lady Rust did give Unseen University a rather generous donation.”

Vimes pulled out his chequebook. What was the point of being the richest man of the city, if he couldn’t throw money at problems and make them go away?

“No delicate issues,” Ridcully said cheerily.

“The students involved in the project -” Vimes started.

“Will be suitably fined in the Archchancellor’s Court. I’m sure a project that causes that sort of damage at least falls under Being A Young Rip,” said Ridcully.

Vimes frowned. “They didn’t entirely want to do it. They were cursed. Two of them are still cursed.”

The thing about DiMA was, he mostly lied by omission, when he lied. Sometimes, he was so good at lying by omission that he even tricked himself. If DiMA actually stated something, he probably thought it was the truth. He was a reasonably reliable witness, accounting for his idiosyncrasies.

“I can’t say I have any use for students who can’t dispel a curse,” said Ridcully.

“You’re saying it’s too hard to teach?” Vimes asked acidly, thinking about young Sam, who saw octarine, and he inwardly damned his own eyes.

Ridcully looked at Vimes with narrowed eyes. “I can show those wags how it’s done.”

Shortly thereafter, Vimes saw two glazed-eyed, dead-tired looking student wizards. They looked worse than coppers who’d been double-shifting during the lead-up to an old school Koom Valley Day in Grune, and that was saying something. There was a third student wizard, who looked rather better off. All three were faintly familiar, from his arrival back in Ankh-Morpork, but Vimes thought there was a fourth one who was missing. The rested looking one, Dolly Sisters by the accent - Alf? - said, panicked, “It’s the Archchancellor! And Commander Vimes!” He looked between Ridcully and Vimes with an expression of abject horror on his face, and he shot a very dirty, betrayed look over at DiMA, who had followed a few steps behind Vimes and Ridcully.

The Ephebian one - Zinon? - started, “Sir, I just wish to tender that it was wheat, not oats, and I -”

“Shut up,” Ridcully said. “You. Consecrate a mirror, put it in a bowl of black salt, and put a picture of whoever cursed you in the bowl with the mirror.”

Zinon blinked slowly. “It reverses the negative energy, sir?”

“Hmm. Interesting thought. Keep thinking it.” said Ridcully, and he turned to the Agatean one - Xian? - sizing him up, “You. Selenite wand. Sweep it over yourself a few inches over your skin. Burn some mugwort.”

Xian appeared to think frantically like a mouse in a maze and stammered, “To draw out the darkness, sir?”

“More or less on track,” said Ridcully dismissively, then he turned on Alf, “and you, since you’re the only one up for paying attention. Icono-game projects are heretofore against the lore. I’ll see you three in Archchancellor’s Court.”

Alf continued to glare at DiMA.

“What about the one who did this to them?” Vimes asked.

“They shouldn’t have let him do it, should they? And they’ll know better next time,” said Ridcully. “I could go for some cheese scones. Fancy some?”

Vimes did follow after Ridcully, though he didn’t feel like cheese scones. His stomach turned. “That wasn’t fair.”

“You may be the Law, Sam, but in here, I’m the Lore,” said Ridcully.

“They suffered for weeks, when all they needed was a trip to a rock shop and some kitchen supplies -” Vimes started.

“I could have told them anything. It’ll work because the Archchancellor told them it would,” Ridcully said absently.

“And you’re doing nothing about the person who hurt them!” Vimes seethed.

“Sam. Calm down. Have a scone. You don’t understand much about wizards. Something will be done. It’s traditional to give the victims the first crack at it,” said Ridcully, settling back down at the tea table and helping himself to a pair of cheese scones, “but anyone who does that sort of thing has enemies. They’ll be notified in due time.”

Vimes simmered. That wasn’t justice. That was revenge. He had a cheese scone. He didn’t feel any calmer. He’d often said he’d never have any magic in his Watch, aside from, of course, natural occult. So, Vimes suddenly wondered, who was watching the magic?

He’d had another question for Ridcully, though. “Could you or a suitable expert come by the Yard sometime soon to give a talk on elves?”

“That could be arranged, but why the interest? There’s hardly any elves left on the Disc,” said Ridcully.

Vimes toyed with his cup of tea. “I think there might be one in Ankh-Morpork.”

“Oh? Milk going sour? Withered plants? Blunted razors? Clouded mirrors?” asked Ridcully innocently.

“A man with an empty mind,” said Vimes dourly, and he started thinking about some of the odder murders that had been cropping up lately, the zither player with her arteries pulled out like strings, the guitar player who’d played it until his fingers bled and kept on bleeding, the troll singer who’d been shattered by a falling set of stone drums and all the potential witnesses were too foggy to remember anything...

Ridcully’s expression turned shrewd. “Might be, might be. You don’t think a vampire…?”

“DiMA said he picked up a glamour quotient on the… victim,” Vimes admitted.

“Say, Sam, what is DiMA, anyway? You seem to know him. I’ve seen him about the University. Shifty fellow,” said Ridcully.

“A pain in my arse,” Vimes grumbled. “Artificial man, real hassle.”

“Takes all sorts,” said Ridcully. “Now, I could be up for hunting an elf, I haven’t done that in ages…”

Vimes’s face twisted. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Visions of Ridcully and his crossbow let loose in Ankh-Morpork flooded through Vimes’s mind like the River Ankh overflowing.

* * *

After a long, unscenic boat-ride over the Circle Sea where most of what he saw was the contents of his own stomach, Chatur staggered into what he very much hoped was his parents’ home. He couldn’t really remember why he’d been sent home. He’d been working on something and…

That was about it. Something about goats? No, why would he be working on goats? Hex had a goat skull; it was required for proper operation. Maybe they needed to breed a new sort of goat, with bigger skulls, a sort of expanded ram…

Wait, was it a sheep skull?

Chatur didn’t know.

A woman with greying hair pulled into a tight, severe bun swept towards him and directed, “Chatur, give your old mother a kiss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: [Oklo on Roundworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo) was probably the inspiration for Loko of Discworld.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	12. Dear Sam * Interviews and Letters * Not Like This

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Can't Help Me Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEBt7flPC2I&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=21) by Rob Thomas and [Rescue Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nym5stAJAt8&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=22) by OneRepublic. 
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Dear Sam * Interviews and Letters * Not Like This_

Vimes took DiMA with him when he left Unseen University; DiMA had mentioned that Igorina thought she could recalibrate Valentine’s Geiger counter with DiMA and Vimes’s Pip-Boy, so Vimes thought that they might as well get that done. On the way back, he was intercepted by one of the Patrician’s clerks. Vimes sighed and sent DiMA on ahead; the last thing he wanted was DiMA to run afoul of the Patrician. That was a meeting of the minds that didn’t need to happen.

“I believe there’s something you’d like to explain to me?” asked Vetinari.

Vimes sighed and explained, “Lady Rust commissioned for the _Aftermath_ icono-game to be restarted. It continued to pull game elements into Ankh-Morpork, the way that it pulled me back. It pulled in a ‘scorchbeast’, a bat-dragon thing.” Sybil would want one, he was sure. “The scorchbeast went on a short rampage, killed three, injured eight bystanders and Igorina, and died after a large rock fell on it. I’ve spoken with Archchancellor Ridcully; that project is cancelled, indefinitely, sir.”

“I had voiced reservations about making unreal people real,” Vetinari observed.

“Those were real people already! And it was the same process that embodied me. Leaving them behind to die wouldn’t have helped anything, sir,” Vimes protested. “The problem was that bloody game being restarted.”

“I suppose Lady Rust will need to seek alternate methods of entertainment,” said Vetinari. “Was there anything else you wanted to tell me?”

“No, sir,” Vimes said.

* * *

Igorina was already back up. If being pale was fashionable, the salons ought to have been paying her to try on their clothes. Valentine understood that she’d been badly injured fighting the bat-dragon thing, which was somehow DiMA’s fault, in some nebulous fashion. Three people had died, and more were injured.

When Vimes stalked off towards Unseen University with DiMA, Valentine wondered if he was ever going to see his brother again.

Then DiMA wandered back by himself and explained that one of the Patrician’s clerks had flagged Vimes down for a meeting, but DiMA expected that Vimes would be along presently. Cops were nosy. Igorina beat Valentine to asking, “So what happened, anyway?”

DiMA rubbed the back of his head, adjusting the cables, and admitted, “Commander Vimes spoke with Archchancellor Ridcully, and they came to an agreement that the _Aftermath_ icono-game project should be cancelled indefinitely.”

“So what kind of trouble are you in, DiMA?” Valentine asked.

DiMA looked embarrassed and explained, “I have to pay 75 pence to the Archchancellor’s Court for Being A Young Rip and a further $1.00 for Being Found Objectionably Sober.”

“That’s it?” Valentine said, incredulous. It hardly seemed fair. He’d heard that people had died. And, all right, he knew it hadn’t been intentional on DiMA’s part, and he didn’t want DiMA to be executed, or anything, but…

“I make $4 a month, Nick,” DiMA observed.

A total of $1.75 was 43.75% of DiMA’s monthly income. Valentine didn’t know what DiMA did with his money, but phrased that way, the fine did sound stiffly punitive. Besides, if the _Aftermath_ icono-game was shut down, there wouldn’t be any further incursions.

Igorina said, “Valentine, you know the wizards lost a whole street a few years back, right? Mayhap Street. And then there was the surreal hurricane last summer. These things happen. They’re the perils of living next to the Disc’s oldest magical university. These days, the insurance underwriters even take it into account.”

“I should have done something sooner,” DiMA admitted, looking morose.

“Eh. It’s not like you had all the facts,” Valentine admitted, thinking about how Vimes had _not_ wanted to go to the wizards about this. Vimes preferred not to get magic involved in his problems, and Valentine certainly understood that, but it had meant that there’d been a handful of people each with a handful of puzzle pieces and no way to put them together. The wizards did know that the incursions _were_ happening; they just didn't know _when_ they were happening.

When the Commander finally stalked back, Igorina flagged him down. “Mister Vimes! Could I borrow you and your Pip-Boy? DiMA’s here, so that makes two working Geiger counters, so I think I can get Valentine’s recalibrated, finally.”

“Yes, DiMA mentioned that to me,” said Vimes, irritably. He looked over at Valentine, but the synth couldn’t quite place his expression. He seemed to want to say more, but not in public.

So Igorina took them aside and pulled out known gram samples of various troll drugs, checked the readings on DiMA and the Pip-Boy’s Geiger counters, factored in the standard deviations, and recalibrated Valentine’s geiger counter. For the first time in about two months, instead of screaming and static, Valentine again had a precise sense of the ambient radiation again. It was like when vision cleared up after being blinded by the sun. 

* * *

Valentine went back to his apartment alone. He could understand Vimes not wanting Valentine to interact overly much with the suspect he’d apprehended. Anyone could accuse Valentine of intentionally holding the suspect underwater a bit too long or deliberately slamming his head into something and blame the man’s brain damage on Valentine. If brutality charges stuck, Valentine would be off the force and, quite likely, in the Tanty. 

He found his landlady throwing his meagre possessions out on the street, some of Harry King’s boys already swooping down on them. Valentine hurried up and shouted, “Hey! What’s the big idea?”

His landlady seethed, “You - you’re disgusting! And you’re not getting any refund, you filthy molly.”

Valentine grabbed up his library books, because the Librarian would have his head if Harry King’s boy’s pulped the books for their paper, and he grabbed up his spare outfits, and that was all he could grab. Harry King’s boys took the alcohol and the furniture. Confused, Valentine protested, “ _What?_ ”

So some of the Watch thought Valentine was a molly, because Nobby had gotten entirely the wrong idea about Zinon and Valentine and because coppers gossiped like fishwives. Surely his landlady wouldn’t throw him out just because Nobby mistakenly thought that Valentine had banged a wizard?

His landlady brandished a newspaper in his face, which showed Vimes and Valentine embracing and locking lips.

* * *

One moment, Vimes had been at his desk, trying to sort through his paperwork. The next moment, he had Miss Cripslock at his desk, asking him if he had any comment on several prints of him and Valentine, which came out as a blurted, “Oh, huh. Nick really doesn’t come off well in pictures, does he?”

“So you acknowledge this is an iconograph of Mr. Valentine?” asked Cripslock, writing in her notebook.

“It’s Nick,” Vimes acknowledged guardedly, feeling numb, as if someone had smacked him between the eyes. He’d wanted to discuss _them_ , him and Nick, with Valentine before any of this mess came out publicly. Beneath the numbness, his rage started to build. Who’d leaked these? “It’s not an iconograph. It’s not that light hit a glass plate and then imps painted the scene. Look at it, it’s a piece of paper, not a glass still. It’s printed. Probably printed by Hex, because it looks like an _Aftermath_ icono-game still.”

Cripslock nodded, acknowledging the differences between an iconograph and a print. “This event occurred in the icono-game?”

Vimes was aware that he could lie. He knew the wizards could run off prints of other elements of the game; he’d asked them for those. He could have said the images were a fiction of posing. The thing was, if he was the _Times_ , he’d have someone dispatched to talk to Valentine at the same time. He thought a bit more, grimacing. He’d send someone to talk to Sybil, too. There was no chance a lie would match up with what Valentine and Sybil said.

Besides, Vimes did want to talk to Valentine and see if Valentine would let himself be talked around. A lie would ruin any chances Vimes had.

“Yes. It did,” Vimes said. “You already covered that I thought I was gone for months, nearly a year, and that I thought my Lady Sybil was dead. I thought I was a widower.”

“So you acknowledge that there was an affair between you and Mr. Valentine?” said Miss Cripslock.

“No, because an affair would mean I knew I wasn’t single,” Vimes corrected, the first time he’d ever said it that way. He usually thought of it as an affair, himself, in his self-recrimination, but Sybil kept telling him it wasn’t.

“But you did engage in gross indecency with him?” Miss Cripslock continued.

“No. That wasn’t a charge, there,” Vimes said, “and it’s not a charge here now.”

“Isn’t that convenient for you, Mr. Vimes?” asked Cripslock.

“It’s not a matter of convenience for anyone. It’s a matter of justice,” said Vimes. 

“Some would say that allowing mollies to go about in public is a miscarriage of justice,” Miss Cripslock said carefully.

“Could you tell me who you’re quoting on that?” asked Vimes, grabbing his pen and flipping over a piece of paper on his desk. He’d seen a letter that expressed a sentiment similar to that recently, from the League of Decency, and he’d tossed it into the office fireplace. It didn’t matter that he already knew who was saying that. He wanted to see if Cripslock would tell him.

Miss Cripslock shifted the subject. “You did have a liaison with Mr. Valentine?”

“Yes. We courted,” Vimes said, making it plain.

“How do you think your wife will feel about this revelation?” asked Miss Cripslock.

“I don’t need to think. I told her the day I arrived back in Ankh-Morpork and saw her alive,” said Vimes.

Miss Cripslock pressed, “Her Ladyship didn’t object to having a molly for a husband?”

“She doesn’t have a molly for a husband.” What was the word Nick used? “I’m bisexual.”

Miss Cripslock looked momentarily flummoxed. “Excuse me, did you just say you’re a velocipede?”

“No, no! Bisexual. It’s… same and different,” hazarded Vimes.

“Spell that.”

It took Vimes a moment. “B i s e x u a l.”

“But you fancy men,” said Miss Cripslock.

“So?”

“You might leave her for a man,” said Miss Cripslock primly.

“I wouldn’t leave Sybil for _anyone_ ,” Vimes snapped, hands flat on his desk and leaning slightly forward.

“You employ Mr. Valentine as a Constable,” Miss Cripslock continued smoothly. “How would you respond to allegations that you’ve taken advantage of your position with him?”

“That I haven’t,” said Vimes, a new shade of fury added to his flame. How dare she insinuate that he’d take advantage of Nick? He would never!

No one had ever thrown a fit about Carrot and Angua, and him her superior from the day she’d joined the force. But Carrot and Angua _looked_ like a human couple between man and woman, even if Carrot was legally a dwarf and Angua was actually a werewolf.

“What about allegations that you’ve shown Mr. Valentine undue favouritism?”

“I haven’t done that, either! Why is this even news?”

“Certain community leaders are questioning your judgment, stating that if you can’t make up your mind here, how can you possibly be trusted to make up your mind on any important civic matters,” Miss Cripslock paraphrased.

“I fail to see how courting Mr. Valentine when I thought I was single shows any indecision,” said Vimes flattly.

“Some would question why you can’t choose to court only ladies,” said Miss Cripslock.

“Why is this any of their business? I’m not courting them,” said Vimes, sourly. “Do you ask people why they won’t settle down and only court people of one hair colour? One eye colour? No, you don’t.”

“What kind of example do you think you’re setting for your children?”

 _A piss-poor one, but not because I love Nick_. 

“I don’t see what bearing that question has on anything,” said Vimes frostily, although he knew bloody well what she was implying.

“Do you really think poor little children deserve to be exposed to that sort of obscenity?” Miss Cripslock clarified.

Vimes gave her a weary look. “I can spend ten minutes looking in back-alleys in this city and find a corpse that any child can trip over, and you really think two grown men kissing is an obscenity?”

Miss Cripslock paused, apparently unwilling to say that _her_ answer was ‘yes’. He wondered how much of ‘some say’ and ‘the public feels’ was what _she_ said and felt. She rallied, “If there are corpses in the alleys, the Commander of the Watch is clearly distracted from his job -”

She’d grown up in Ankh-Morpork; he knew that. Vimes flipped back over his piece of paperwork. “Yes. By you haranguing me. Run along now, would you? I’ve said my piece.” 

* * *

Sybil was out in her dragon pens when Willikins brought her a copy of the newspaper. He had on his hat with the glint of metal under the brim, an unspoken question hanging there. She said, “No. I knew about this. Sam told me straight away when he returned home. He thought I was dead, you know. I wonder where they found these pictures?”

“I understand that this is an embarrassment to Her Ladyship,” Willikins said stiffly.

Vimes did many things that embarrassed Sybil, often semi-deliberately, mainly at parties, but this wasn’t an intentional faux pas on his part to antagonize her. She said slowly, “Why should I be embarrassed, that someone else might look at my Sam and see someone worthy of love?”

“The concern is more that His Grace reciprocated, that his appetites are… unusual,” Willikins said circumspectly.

Sybil laughed. “Hardly.” No, Sam’s appetites satisfied Sybil very, very well. Sam sampling something exotic hadn’t changed that one bit. Gods, if only Sybil could induce Sam to diversify his tastes on the actual dining plate.

“There is the young Lord de Worde at the front door. He wishes an audience with Her Ladyship,” said Willikins, with the unspoken offer that de Worde could be removed.

He was the chief editor for the _Times_ , Sybil was well-aware. She said resolutely, “I should be delighted to entertain him. Do see him in and arrange for tea.”

“As you wish, madam,” said Willikins.

So soon, Sybil sat down with de Worde, who wanted an interview with Sybil about how she felt about her husband’s alleged indiscretion. She had the sense that it would be better to be one and done, with regards to the matter. If she said nothing, Sybil implied that there was something to hide. No, if she said something, Sybil had control over what she said, albeit not over how she was quoted.

She felt some irritation that Sam hadn’t sorted out his intentions on the matter sooner. If Vimes had entreated Valentine, and if Valentine would have accepted, they could have made a formal society announcement at a time of their choosing, after she’d sent some choice letters to several key people. 

“How do you feel about your husband having an affair, your ladyship?” inquired de Worde, who was doing a good job of appearing sympathetic.

“He didn’t,” Sybil corrected gently. “He thought I was dead and that he was a widower.”

“Still, it must come as a shock to you to learn that your husband, ah, has certain inclinations,” de Worde said, delicately.

What had come as a shock was the concept that Vimes could actually realize someone was sincerely flirting with him. Sybil remembered that she’d had a difficult time with him during their courtship. She half wanted to compare notes with Valentine about what he’d tried. “No. He told me right away, the day he arrived back in Ankh-Morpork. None of this is a shock.”

“And you’ve stayed with him, despite… ah?”

“Why wouldn’t I? He’s the same man.”

“Aren’t you worried that he might leave you for a man?”

“I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what my husband is like, to ask that question,” Sybil said mildly, one eyebrow arched. She needed to write a good deal of letters, she saw, and started mentally drafting them. “He wouldn’t leave me for anyone. If he decided to bring home an additional partner, he’d ask me first for approval.”

De Worde appeared off-balanced by that and also that he likely thought Sybil herself was off-balanced for saying such a thing. He took a moment, looking over his notes, to compose himself. “But you’d allow him to bring home an additional partner?” 

“If I approved of him,” said Sybil, very deliberately.

“That is an unusual stance,” de Worde said carefully.

“My family has always kept what’s ours,” said Sybil, smiling. “Besides, there was a Hublander princess in my year at the Quirm College for Young Ladies whose father had several wives.” Those Hublander chieftains, they’d rescue women from the sacrificial rites of doddering old priests, and before they knew it, they’d have another wife.

“Ah, _wives_ are at least somewhat traditional, in certain locales…” de Worde said hesitantly.

Sybil studied him, and she started, in the speaking voice equivalent of the operatic voice that had carried the part of Bloodaxe, “Once, there was a young lady from a good family near the Cutshade Forest, who was engaged to a dashing knight.”

De Worde frowned and said, “A fairy tale?”

“Let me finish,” Sybil shushed, “The knight was so gallant, however, that he drew the attention of the Fair Folk, and they spirited him away and replaced him with a changeling. At first, the young lady did not notice, although, as her wedding drew near, she began to have suspicions. The changeling, who had been made from a piece of wood, came to realize what he was. Overcome with guilt, he confessed to her on what would have been their wedding night. Together, they set off to retrieve her true betrothed.”

“The Fair Folk took the changeling knight captive and presented to her both the changeling and her own true betrothed, bound and gagged, and they asked her to identify her love. They claimed that if she could identify him correctly, they would allow her to take him home.”

The Fair Folk lied, of course.

Sybil continued solemnly, “Of course, if she was wrong, the Fair Folk would make all of them scream until their voices wore out and then string up their bones for wind-chimes.”

“But the young lady had come to be quite impressed by the changeling knight, who had been honest with her when he realized what he was and had risked himself to help her recover her own love, and the young lady, who was quite well-schooled in folklore, had come prepared, so she tossed iron horseshoes that she’d hidden upon her person at the Fair Folk, and she spirited away with both knights.”

The Fair Folk lied, but if the young lady had been asked to identify _one_ love, she would have been lying, and the Fair Folk would have known that and used it against her.

Sybil concluded, “Lady Bertha Pettitt. She was three years ahead of me at the Quirm College, you know.” She sighed. “Of course, she did get in trouble with the law for bigamy and was transported to Fourecks, but we still write sometimes, and she has always been very happy with her two men.”

At the time of Bertha’s transportation, exile to Fourecks had been a death sentence by another name. In the old days, the Terror Incognita had been a myth. No ship went there on purpose. ‘Being transported to Fourecks’ was what happened to nobles who hadn’t quite done enough to justify the executioner’s sword but had done near enough32. When the last continent opened up, Sybil had been quite pleasantly surprised when Bertha wrote back to her and sent some handsome pencil portraits of her children and grandchildren.

Sybil added brightly, “Isn’t Havelock’s cleanup of the marriage laws lovely? Bertha and her Alan and her Alon will be able to come and visit me in Ankh-Morpork now.”

De Worde paused, considering. Surely he saw that it would be churlish to deny a gentlewoman who had fought the Fair Folk her two husbands. He was an intelligent young man. De Worde saw the parallel that Sybil was drawing. He conceded, “It is true that some situations have necessitated alternate arrangements.”

“Indeed,” Sybil agreed brightly, “Of course, if you’ve read your Classics, there was also Empress Drapery of Klatch, who had five husbands due to a sporting mishap… these things happen. One does one’s best.”

De Worde appeared to be trying to imagine what sort of sporting mishap could lead to quintuple matrimony and, failing that, scribed a note in the margin of his notebook. “Ah, yes…”

“Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?” said Sybil sweetly, sipping her tea.

“No. No, I don’t think there is, madam,” said de Worde, who seemed slightly in a daze.

32 [Impersonating a Djelibeybian was also punishable by transportation.](https://www.21crimes.com/thecrimes) Vimes always made certain his Cable Street Particulars were aware of that law.

* * *

As old Longfellow stared off at the horizon, a mirage wavered in his vision, the blazing sun pitiless overhead. The mirage looked like a forest, albeit a very orderly, brightly coloured forest, but he knew that the only thing this blasted place had was heat, sand, and wildlife that knew a thousand ways to kill a man and was learning more all the time. Longfellow was having a ball.

He’d been running carts. Longfellow didn’t ask too many questions, and the people he worked with said less. They understood each other. 

But now he’d gone and fallen off the canvas top of a cart as he’d been grappling with a marauder. Longfellow took a little pride in that; he’d merely fallen off. The marauder had fallen under the cart’s wheels. The cart had rolled on, and his mates had rolled on without him. Scags, the lot of them.

So Longfellow wandered aimlessly off over the dunes. That mirage forest seemed to be getting closer. He was startled by a man on the far side of middle age. The man was deeply tanned, with a wooden face, and he was dressed like a forester, though something about his bearing said that he knew his way about the old sword that hung on his belt. He greeted, “Ow ya goin’, mate?”

“It’s going by feet,” Longfellow grunted.

The trees were getting closer. He fancied they might be bananas.

The man gave him a sly look. “Fell off a cart, didja?”

“Might have,” said Longfellow.

Those were definitely bananas. It was a shame they were a mirage, because he could have done with eating one.

“What would you say to running some banana wine?”33

33 [You’ve got to do something with those bananas.](https://vaya.in/recipes/details/banana-wine-recipe/) [What, you expect people to eat them?](https://homebrewanswers.com/banana-wine-recipe/)

* * *

Vimes longed for a budget meeting with Vetinari. He could handle a budget meeting. The older they both became, the more that they acknowledged that while, yes, Vimes could fund the Watch by himself, that was not a tenable long term solution for the city. Someday, there would be no Commander Vimes. There’d be a Commander Ironfoundersson, and they’d be doing that future Commander Ironfoundersson a deep disservice if they bequeathed a budget crisis unto him.

This was not a budget meeting. This was Vetinari, sitting there with a newspaper that he would not let Vimes see, despite the Commander’s circumspect glances. The Patrician looked like the cat who had eaten the canary and then convinced the canary’s family to give the cat the funeral expenses. 

“Sir,” Vimes said, frowning. He hadn’t been told why he was here, but he could bloody well guess. His private life had to be everyone’s public business. Hundreds of nobles and other notables in Ankh-Morpork had affairs or hired the services of the Seamstresses' Guild, and no one cared, but the moment Vimes did anything, everyone was in a tizzy. But no, it wasn’t that he’d done _anything_ \- if he’d accepted Piper’s advances, there wouldn’t have been this upset. An older man and a younger mistress? Oh, that happened so commonly as to pass without comment. Two older men from different species, now _that_ was what the city had a problem with. He seethed at the injustice of it all.

“I must confess my surprise that your indiscretion was not handled terminally, your Grace. The Lady Sybil is most formidable,” said Vetinari lightly.

“I thought she was dead. You know that. She knows that, sir,” Vimes said sullenly. He was sick of saying it. He was sick that he had to say it.

“But never did rationality and jealousy walk the same path,” Vetinari mused. “I had considered that you might be halfway an invert yourself. I hadn't considered that you might possess the self-awareness to notice that fact, your Grace."

“How is this relevant, sir?” asked Vimes.

“Because the eyes of Ankh-Morpork are upon you, and they do not like what they see, your Grace. It is, shall we say, suboptimal for the city to have a Commander of the Watch whom the city alternatively wishes to see hung, sent away to a small island for the crime of _ergi_34, castrated -”

“Sir, I am aware of the general opinion on my activities,” Vimes said, lips pressed into a thin unhappy line. The angry letters were already pouring in. Where was this anger over what Lady Selachii’s son did to that poor woman?

“So convenient for you that I removed the Hedgehog Act and the Quirmian Butcher Amendment, your Grace,” the Patrician observed.

Vimes stiffened. “That wasn’t about me, sir.”

“You wanted to protect your paramour, your Grace?” inquired Vetinari.

“Not even that. I’m sworn to protect. That goes for everyone. Those laws got in the way of my duty, sir,” Vimes said carefully.

“And now your dalliances are getting in the way of your duty. You’re going to have to take care of him, your Grace.”

Vimes blinked. He paused. Some time passed. A heartbeat. A lifetime. A train crash. Was Vetinari suggesting…? The thought refused to process. Vimes couldn’t think it. Once he got around the shape of it, he closed his eyes and said immediately, “No, sir.”

“No? I don’t think you understand. You will take care of this, your Grace.”

“I’ll take care of it, sir,” Vimes agreed, without agreeing. He wasn’t going to have Nick murdered. He would never! But he’d handle the situation. He had a patrol during Swing shift, and then he’d find Nick and… well, he wanted to ask Nick if he could kiss the man in public on the steps of Patrician’s Palace, just to spite _everyone_ , and Vimes didn’t even _like_ kissing in public, but he was aware that would be cruel to Nick. So he resolved to ask Nick something different.

34 [It’s okay to be a man’s man, but as long as you’re not a man who belongs to a man.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergi)

* * *

Shaun and young Sam were on the large side lot of their parent’s mansion, playing in the snow. Codsworth watched attentively. Valentine was glad it was Codsworth, the army of Mr. Handies debacle aside. If it was Willikins, it would have made everything more difficult. Valentine had, after all, disgraced Willikins’s mistress by sullying her husband.

Codsworth even greeted warmly, “Mr. Valentine. So good to see you haven’t been torn apart by ravening packs of paparazzi.”

Valentine arched an eyebrow, unsure if that was an actual real danger in Ankh-Morpork. He settled on saying, “Me, too, Codsworth. I was hoping I could just talk to Shaun for a bit?”

Shaun was trying to make a snowman, but he was going about in a rather more serious fashion than most children, unless perhaps they were child Igors. He’d laid out a skeleton of icicles and was packing snow muscles around them. Young Sam was lying in the snow and making snow dragons. Shaun noticed Valentine, and he perked up and ran over to give him a hug.

Oh, this was going to hurt.

“Nick!” Shaun exclaimed happily.

“Hullo, Mr. Valentine,” said young Sam, sitting up.

“Hey there, kiddos,” said Valentine, hugging Shaun back. “Ah… I don’t expect you’ve heard the news?”

“I’ve heard lots of news, like that eel that got caught gargoyling,”35 said Shaun.

“And there was a family that was besieged with bees, because the paint was mixed with syrup,”36 added young Sam, smartly. “Winter bees. The worst kind.”

“Not those articles. Uhm. Shaun. Someone leaked pictures of me and your father,” Valentine started. “It’s going to be bad for his reputation. It’ll make it more difficult for him to do his job, and the man does a lot of good around here.”

“Why will it be bad?” asked young Sam.

Shaun, though, knew and understood enough to have an inkling. Valentine reluctantly pulled out a newspaper. He meant only to show Shaun, but young Sam got in there and demanded to know, “Why were you kissing my father?”

“Y’know, your parents should have discussed this with you,” but they didn’t, so on whose shoulders did it end up but old Nick Valentine? “When your father went away, he thought your mother was dead. So he thought he was single. So I thought he was single. So we dated. I was your father’s boyfriend. _Someone_ got ahold of a picture from that time.”

Lady Rust didn’t like Sam Vimes. Something to do with her brother. Lady Rust had that icono-game back up and running as _Aftermath_. Valentine had suspicions there.

“Oh,” said young Sam, looking troubled.

“So there’s pictures in the newspaper. So what?” said Shaun.

“According to folks around here, men aren’t supposed to date other people if they have wives, and they’re definitely not supposed to date men, and people are inclined to ignore the fact that Sam and I both thought he was single at the time and haven’t done anything since,” explained Valentine. “This is bad for your father’s reputation, even if it’s unfair.” It was, incidentally, also bad for Valentine’s reputation, but he didn’t really care about that.

Shaun bit his lip and then asked, “How do you fix it?” 

“I leave. I go away. Eventually, people won’t care anymore,” said Valentine sadly. He didn’t want to leave. He’d lost one home. This one was _real_. But Vimes did so much for Ankh-Morpork. Valentine couldn’t get in the way of that.

“And then you come back?” Shaun asked, voice faint.

“No. I stay gone for good,” Valentine said, trembling slightly.

The broken look on the face of the Generation 3 synth who had been his son tore him up as surely as if someone had reached into the gaping holes in his neck, grabbed, and _twisted_.

“No!” said Shaun, grabbing at Valentine’s trenchcoat and sobbing.

Valentine patted Shaun’s head and let him cry.

Young Sam took the newspaper and looked it over. “Miss Iodine Maccalariat of the League of Decency says… oh. Huh. I’d get in trouble for saying that. She shouldn’t say that about my father.” He frowned. “And then High Priest Hughnon Ridcully says… no, I can’t say that, either.” He looked up at Valentine. “If it was bad, why did you do it?”

He asked himself that, sometimes. Often. “It wasn’t bad. People just think it is. Because of tradition and fear.”

Young Sam nodded with something like satisfaction. “My father wouldn’t do something if it was wrong.”

He was handling the news that his father had a busted old synth ex-boyfriend remarkably well.

“Why can’t you just stop the people like -” Shaun took the paper from young Sam and waved it angrily, “Why can’t you stop Minister Tobias Gullet from saying these horrible things?”

“Because there’s a lot of people who feel like he does, and I can’t change all their minds,” said Valentine. “The best thing I can do for your father is leave.”

“I don’t want you to,” Shaun said forlornly.

“And I don’t want to leave, but I’m going to Fourecks. Might take a few months. But I’ll write. Maybe send you some dried spiders?” said Valentine.

“I just want you,” said Shaun.

“I love you, kid. I wish I didn’t have to go. But I had better. And hey, young Sam? I love you, too, for what it’s worth,” said Valentine.

“I love you, Dad,” said Shaun, who was quietly crying.

It was then that Valentine realized that Shaun had gotten stuck on his metal hand. They had to flag Codsworth down for some warm water. Then Valentine was gone.

35 [Very naughty.](https://yesterdaysprint.tumblr.com/post/159062714349/st-louis-post-dispatch-missouri-april-12-1909)

36 [Syrup and paint: a bad combination...](https://yesterdaysprint.tumblr.com/post/187448505498/chicago-tribune-illinois-may-3-1934)

* * *

Piper argued that she ought to get the gig of attempting to interview Nick on the grounds that he might actually talk to her. She knew de Worde had suspicions that Piper already knew this story. He was an excellent reporter. He was _the_ reporter and the editor, the alpha and omega. Of course he had suspicions.

Finding Valentine was more difficult than Piper expected. He wasn’t at work - he wasn’t on shift this morning and wasn’t due to be on shift until night. He wasn’t at his apartment. He wasn’t at any of the music joints, coffee houses, or watering holes that he’d gone to with Piper when they’d explored the city together.

She found him down by the docks and showed him a copy of the pictures, and Valentine snarled, “Why couldn’t you learn when not to expose a man’s private affairs?”

Piper put her hands up. “Hey, calm down, Nicky! It wasn’t me. I swear! And there’s half a dozen other reporters who’d like to talk to you. You can talk to me, you can talk to them, or you can say nothing and let everyone fill in the silence with what they want to hear.”

Valentine’s amber optics smouldered at her like banked coals, and he gestured angrily, “If it wasn’t you, who was it? I know Sam or DiMA wouldn’t do it, so there’s a very short list of people who could have leaked those glossies.” 

The pictures weren’t actually glossy.

“You know I can’t name sources!” said Piper. Fact was, she’d asked, and de Worde wouldn’t tell, maybe suspecting that Piper might blab to her friends. She was going to go back and find out, anyway, when de Worde wasn’t looking.

Frustrated, Valentine said, “You mean that you don’t know.”

“I can’t confirm or deny that,” said Piper, crossing her arms.

“Preston’s gone, and that boy wouldn’t say word one. He respects Sam’s privacy. Longfellow is… gone. Deacon’s probably too happy to have blackmail over Sam to spoil the good thing he’s got going, not that Sam would let himself be blackmailed. It’s just the principle of the thing, for Deacon. He may have no mouth, but Codsworth’s got the world’s stiffest upper lip. He’d never embarrass his master like that. Strong doesn’t even understand what happened. I suppose that gaggle of wizards might know, but… why? Why leak it? They don’t care about the gossip of mundane lives. They just care about their arguments!” Nick said, puzzling through it angrily.

Piper took a few notes as Valentine handily identified who she ought to go interview, after she was done talking to him and after she reported back for that staff meeting. Yes, she’d indeed be paying that gaggle of wizards a call. “So, do you have any statement on these pictures?”

Valentine sighed. “Fine. Sure. That they’re from inside the _Aftermath_ icono-game, that Sam thought his wife was dead and that he was single, that it wasn’t illegal or anything in the Commonwealth, heh, not that much was, and that Sam dumped me the moment he realized his wife was alive. Happy?”

Piper tilted her head slightly to the side, her expression strained. No, she wasn’t happy. Originally, she hadn’t seen why Vimes didn’t ask Sybil for permission to keep dating Valentine. That’s what they would have done in the Commonwealth. Love was rare enough, let alone two loves? Vimes ought to have jumped on that like a hotcake. Piper had been in Ankh-Morpork long enough now to know that polyamory was rare, chiefly polygyny, and almost exclusively practised by marginalized peoples: Zoons, Klatchians, Hublanders, goblins, and so on.

She sighed, “Oh, Nicky. No. You deserve better. We both know that, even if you won’t admit it to yourself. But… what are you going to do now?”

“Now?” snapped Valentine. “Now, I’m going to buy a ticket to Fourecks, and I’m never coming back.” He sighed, and his tone grew softer. “I’ll miss you and Nat, Piper. Let Preston know I’ve gone? I’ll write when I can. But I can’t be the albatross hanging around Sam’s neck, so I’ve got to go.”

Piper’s eyes widened. “Nick, no! You don’t have to do that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“What would be wrong is Sam being prevented from doing his job. People will question his judgement if I’m around,” said Valentine, who looked worn, diminished.

“But they’ll be wrong! He’s not bad for having dated you! Now, he’s a jerk over how he broke up...” Piper opined, trying to figure out how to make Valentine’s quotes into anything like a sympathetic but coherent and unbiased story. The ‘unbiased’ part was going to be the hard part, no joke. Piper wanted to punch out this whole city. She was going to be crying on Sally’s shoulder this night, she was sure.

“I can’t change a whole city’s mind,” said Valentine, defeated.

“It’s not the whole city, though,” said Piper.

“It’s enough of it,” said Valentine, and then he amended, “too much of it.”

Piper looked over her notes, “Would you say that this city is hostile to…” she searched for the word, “...queer people?”

“Hah!” Valentine laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Yeah, I would. I mean, it’s nothing big, just a hideously elevated assault rate, housing insecurity, the threat of blackmail... that there are religions here screaming that queer folks ought to be punished with impalement, disembowelment, garrote, or stoning, depending who you ask?” Valentine rattled off.

Piper knew all that well. “Do you think it’ll be any better in Fourecks?”

“Honestly? No. I think it’ll be worse for me,” Valentine said bluntly, “but I don’t care about me. I just want Sam to be able to do his job without folks hassling him over me. He’s a good man, and he’s done great things for this city.”

“Don’t you think there’s any other way?” asked Piper.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be down here, looking to buy a ticket,” said Valentine sadly. “You keep your nose clean, huh, Piper? And give Nat my love.”

Piper hugged Nick, and he hugged back, and she did cry, tears dampening the shoulder of his old trenchcoat. She was being terribly unprofessional for a reporter. She didn’t care. It was all so unfair!

Valentine patted her. “Y’see now, Piper? No good came of folks nosing up my private business.”

* * *

> DiMA,
> 
> I gotta leave town. I think you’ll be able to figure out why. I wish I didn’t have to go. I’ll miss a lot of people. Funnily enough, you’re one of them. Keep out of trouble, and if trouble gets into you, please, for the love of God, ask someone for help. You don’t have to handle everything on your own. I’m headed to Fourecks. I’ll write you when I can.
> 
> Love,
> 
> Nick Valentine

DiMA looked at Zinon and Xian, who were sleeping in their chairs, slumped against their desks. He thoughts about the pictures in the paper. They were going to have words, when those two sleeping beauties finally woke up.

* * *

Tucked into the bottom drawer of the Commander of the Watch’s deck, under the bottle of whiskey, was a letter.

> Dear Sam,
> 
> I love you. I wish I could stay. I wish you loved me. I wish a lot of things. But wishes ain’t wings. Give Sybil my regards. She’s a great gal. You two hold on tight to each other and look after the boys.
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Nick Valentine

* * *

> Deacon,
> 
> You probably know where I’m going before I do. If you don’t, you’re slipping.
> 
> Yours Truly,
> 
> Nick Valentine

* * *

“Wait, Lady Sybil said what?” asked Piper, at a staff meeting with de Worde, Cripslock, and Otto.

De Worde seemed slightly dazed, and he flagged down one of the _Times_ ’s staffers and directed, “If you could check Unseen University’s library for books on Empress Drapery?”

“I’m sure Her Grace didn’t mean it,” Cripslock said distantly. “She must have been trying to be polite, I expect.”

De Worde looked down at his shorthand in his notebook and helpfully repeated for Piper, “‘If I approved of him.’”

“Surely she didn’t say ‘him’,” Cripslock fretted.

Piper rose from her seat and looked to the door. “I gotta tell Nicky before his boat shoves off. He doesn’t know, and that changes things!”

“Do you want to finish the story and be on the byline?” Cripslock asked sharply.

Piper sagged. Then a thought hit her, and she called brightly, “Nat!”

Nat had her tuition paid at the Seven Handed Sisters of Sek by a mysterious person who was definitely Blue unsuccessfully trying to be anonymous, and when she wasn’t at school or asleep, she was at the _Times_. She delivered papers when they were short on unlicensed beggars, and otherwise, she assisted the dwarfs with the presses. Goodmountain grudgingly admitted that Nat was good with machines, for a human.

Now Nat poked her head in and said flatly, “What? The new imp-jets that Boddony was trying out are clogged -”

“Nat, forget about the imp-jets for a moment. Run and go find Nick. He’d down by the docks. Tell him he needs to go talk to Blue and Lady Sybil before he leaves,” directed Piper.

“Ahem,” said Cripslock.

“She gave me homework,” de Worde mumbled, looking at his notebook.

Nat shrugged and stalked off, presumably to do as directed.

Otto looked through the notes and the previous articles and went over to de Worde’s desk and unerringly opened one of the drawers and pulled out full-page copies of the pictures of Blue and Nicky smooching. He laid them down on the table and observed, “Zey are not iconographs.”

“No, they’re printed copies,” Cripslock agreed. “It’s strange, how consistent their stories were, almost as if they were telling the truth -”

“They _were_ ,” Piper said mulishly, sinking back into her chair.

“No, I mean zey were never iconographs in ze first place,” Otto corrected, stabbing a finger at the pictures. “Candid shots of ze necking just show some blurry smushed face, bah. Und do you understand how hard it is to pose an iconograph? I haf had Sir Samuel in my iconography studio for zer yearly family portrait, and let me tell you, I can barely get the man to rest his hand on his lady wife’s shoulder, and it is decidedly not for any lack of…” the vampire sniffed, “...love, on his part. No, ze man simply would not stand still for an iconograph of him kissing _anyone_.”

“So it’s a strange technomantic printout,” admitted Cripslock, the engraver’s daughter.

“Und ze lighting is zo bland! Zer is no play of light and shadow! It is… it is… _unreal_. No self-respecting shadows would ever fall like that…” Otto continued to complain.

Piper asked innocently, “So you’re saying it could be fake?”

“But he admitted to the affair!” Cripslock reminded. “With an employee, no less!”

De Worde looked over at Cripslock’s notes. “He admitted to mistakenly believing that his lady wife was deceased. Er.”

“And hey, Blue, er… Sam wasn’t Nick’s employer at that time,” said Piper, narrowing her eyes and thinking about how Cripslock, the _Times_ ’s lead reporter, was married to de Worde, the chief editor. 

“But it could be fake, and zat is ze thing!” Otto’s eyes flashed. “Oh, I know all sorts of tricks vit an iconograph. I could make you see zer Fair Folk in an iconograph good enough to fool ze Cable Street Particulars. But zis, I could not do.” He tapped the pictures. “Zis is a whole new technomancy, and what do zey do with it? Scandal! Scandal and _bland lighting_.”

Otto made scandal sound like a minor peccadillo and bland lighting a mortal sin.

“But we know it happened,” Cripslock rephrased.

“Und so vot if it did? Two men kissing? Zis is news? It happens all zer time. Why, I know a vampire family on Susurration Way, Lewis und Stan und zer daughter Klavdiya, und zey just tied ze knot not zo long ago. No, zis technomancy is news!” argued Otto, accidentally pinning the pictures to the table with a too-sharp nail.

“But they’re vampires,” admitted Cripslock, blushing. “That’s, ah… well. They’re vampires.”

“Zo?” asked Otto, guilelessly.

De Worde rallied. “We’ll run a technology article, too.”

* * *

As he walked the streets, feeling the cobbles under his boots, Vimes simmered with rage. The Patrician had him all wound up. Do away with Nick! As if Vimes would ever! But the work was the thing, and it had to be done. Vimes still did at least two patrols a week. More, if he could. A copper who couldn’t walk the street was useless to him, and he especially included himself in that assessment.

But when he was done this patrol, Vimes would find Valentine and beg his forgiveness and see if maybe…

There was someone coming up behind him - oh, only a mail golem. Vimes was rather a fan of the post office, even if his feelings on its Postmaster were decidedly mixed. Being a mailman was a good, honest working profession. A walking profession. He liked golems, too. They were law-abiding and hard-working.

So it came as a shock to him when the mail golem picked him up and put Vimes in his heavy leather mail bag. Golems were frighteningly fast when they wanted to be. The golem now had a bag of furious, angry Watch Commander, which was rather akin to putting a cat in a bag and about as screamingly noisy. While Vimes didn’t have claws, he did have a shortsword. As he attempted to slice the bag open from the inside, the golem slammed the bag into the cobbles with deliberate golem precision. The dark embraced him.

* * *

Valentine stood in an alcove at the docks, finishing his cigarette and watching the clacks, as he waited for the _Milka_ to be ready to board for departure. Lot of Assassins’ Guild chatter, some Post Office messages…

 _That_ was a Watch all-call. Valentine squinted, impatiently, as he waited for the message to complete.

Commander Vimes had vanished on patrol. One Watchman saw him between Blue Porter Street and Memorial Street. The next Watchman, who had been waiting at Pleader’s Row and Brief Street hadn’t. Fifteen minutes after the second Watchman had expected him, he’d gone looking for Vimes, because if Vimes didn’t show, it usually meant that he’d found something. When he found neither hide nor hair of Vimes, he went and found the previous Watchman, who’d seen Vimes go by. They didn’t find anything, not even a ruckus. Two Watchmen looking turned to four. Nothing.

A sailor from the _Milka_ came out to announce boarding. Valentine handed his ticket off to a person on the street, who went on to become an opera star in Bugarup. There was no way Valentine could leave if he was uncertain what had befallen Vimes.

“You’re out of uniform,” Sergeant Haddock said, irritably, when Valentine slunk up to the commotion at Pleader’s Row and Brief Street.

 _I’m resigned,_ was what Valentine didn’t say. He had turned in the paperwork properly. 

Haddock continued, “Just… go. Be busy. Help someone. I’ve got Washpot, Gravelbeard, Ping, and Fiddyment questioning people in the area, Flint, Hacknee, Bleddyn, and Reg are on perimeter duty, and Captains Angua and Sally traced him down a sewer in the back and are looking down there.” He gestured vaguely, behind a meeting hall.

Valentine looked around. He knew this area well. It was part of Dilibrat’s mail route. They’d found his chem, but they’d never found his body. They thought Dilibrat had walked out, chem or no chem. They suspected the sewers.

Those were the sewers Haddock was vaguely pointing at.

Valentine whistled for Dogmeat and went below. After a few minutes, Dogmeat was at his heels, and when Valentine pulled out the velvet roll of lockpicks and asked, “Think you can find Sam, boy?” Dogmeat barked and splashed off through the sewers. Valentine noted that they took no narrow changes between levels as they descended. Dogmeat was keeping them to big, clear tunnels. Big enough for a mail golem to walk through. Valentine wandered by Dogmeat’s nose and the light of his cigarette.

From Valentine’s tunnel-diving trips with Deacon, he knew that they were vaguely headed towards the University. He thought it all over. 

  * Dilibrat’s body was missing, and Valentine thought that a golem was one of the few entities that could carry off Vimes in a fight.
  * There was a Cult of Atom in Ankh-Morpork, and they were buying pitchblende.
  * Golems ran off holy words.
  * The Cult of Atom had its own tracts.
  * There was an elf running around, likely murdering people, who had tried to induce some schmuck into attacking young Sam.
  * Which had rattled Vimes, maybe throwing him off his game.
  * Lady Rust had the icono-game up and running as _Aftermath_ , and while it had been running, game elements had been pulled in and made real.
  * _Someone_ had started a Cult of Atom.
  * There was one Cultist of Atom who had a serious grudge against Sam Vimes.



It was messy. It didn’t all fit together. Life rarely did.

As Dogmeat padded nearer to the Undercity beneath Unseen University, Valentine started noticing the glowing mushrooms, and his Geiger counter started to click. Dogmeat paused, confused, and he looked around in every direction at a five-way split. Valentine took a moment; even _he_ could smell anise on the air here.

Someone wanted to foul up Sally and Angua, and they’d gone and fouled up Dogmeat in the process. Unsure if it would work, Valentine asked, “Hey, Dogmeat? You know Captain Angua? Tall, muscular blonde woman,” _probably a werewolf_...

Dogmeat barked, though he still looked confused.

“Which way did Angua go?” Valentine asked, looking at the five ways

Dogmeat barked and pointed off to the rightmost tunnel.

This next bit was more of a leap, “Captain Sally? She was there when we arrived. Probably smells like bats.” He made a hand gesture of a fluttering bat.

Dogmeat pointed at the leftmost tunnel.

Valentine poked his head down each of the tunnels and listened to his Geiger counter sing. The radiation here was a bit higher than the typical Ankh-Morpork background radiation. Maybe it was just the University. Maybe some troll drug cooker had dumped some uselessium around here. Maybe it was nothing.

Nothing was all he had.

Valentine took the second from right tunnel, which made his Geiger counter click the loudest. It was a nice, wide tunnel. It was, based off his explorations with Deacon, headed right under the University. The tunnel, despite being straight, managed to somehow circle around and intersect itself. Valentine gritted his teeth together and tied a rope at the tunnel entrance, and when he found the self-intersection again, the rope crossing over, he leapt from the one tunnel instance to the other.

He felt off, uneasy. His Geiger counter picked up its clicking. Dogmeat whined, and Valentine petted him and said, “I’ll take it from here, boy.”

There was no sense in irradiating Dogmeat.

The rest of the tunnel was near flooded, anyway, dank with effluvia. Valentine dared not speculate as to its nature. Something that he desperately hoped was a used sonky squished under his shoe. 

Click…

...click click…

...click click click.

A massive pale centipede, perhaps two yards long, exploded out of the water, jaw-pieces gnashing at Valentine. He blocked with his left forearm and flipped it off of him. Valentine ran, but the centipede had a certain leg advantage on him. He’d left his duty weapons behind in his locker; they weren’t his, after all.

This was beginning to seem ill-planned.

The centipede’s jaws gnashed and snapped onto the hem of his trenchcoat. Valentine slipped the coat off, flipped it over the centipede, and then clocked a punch into what he thought was the centipede’s head. His hand met a _crunch_ and a _squish_.

“Damn. No one’s invented dry cleaning yet,” said Valentine to no one, as pulled his trenchcoat back on.

After more twists, turns, backtracks, and false tracks, Valentine beheld something that definitely did not belong under Unseen University, and Unseen University was vast and strange. Almost anything could have belonged under Unseen University. If DiMA had come to Nick and told him there was a dragon lurking under Unseen University, Nick could buy that. If Deacon told Nick there was an enchanted sleeping ancient king and his knights and the king looked an awful lot like Captain Carrot, Nick wouldn’t buy it, but only because Deacon was doing the saying.

A nuclear submarine did not belong under Unseen University. 

Valentine scaled it, his Geiger counter berating him as he went. The hatch on top was locked. He unrolled the velvet set of lockpicks. Being able to pick a locked submarine door didn’t make much sense, but the Nucleus wasn’t a real submarine. It was a wizard student’s idea of a submarine. Valentine wasn’t good at lock-picking the way Vimes was, but the synth was a fair enough hand at it. As he worked, he muttered to himself, “Did a decent job locking this down, but if I just...”

The hatch opened with heavy creak, and Valentine slipped into the Nucleus. Steam gently wafted from the left. Candles dimly lit the interior. Valentine pressed his back up to a wall as he saw the back of a troll. The troll was gently singing to herself. From his work in the Watch, Valentine was able to confidently say that the troll was, in fact, high as balls.

His Geiger counter was screaming. He knew trolls could get high off radium. Could they get high off ambient radiation?

Valentine carefully backed away, up against the ladder, in the opposite direction from the troll. Down the other side of the hallway, a female human voice called, “Sister Strange, get over here!”

He recognized that voice. She’d been at the pitchblende deal.

“Brother Up’s brought back the infidel!” she continued.

Now Valentine couldn’t leave. Going and finding a Watchman - Sally and Angua couldn’t be too far off, unless the University tunnels had completely turned them around, and he knew where Haddock and a swarm of Watchmen were - would be sensible. He couldn’t leave, though, not if these Children of Atom had a prisoner and not if the prisoner was who Valentine thought he was.

Valentine hoped he was wrong, but he wasn’t usually.

“‘m guarding,” the troll, purportedly Sister Strange, said sluggishly

“It doesn’t matter anymore, and the Watch won’t be here any time soon. Brother Up used an anise seed bomb,” called the woman.

“But there’s… little dragons on the floor. Whoa. Hi, dragons,” said Sister Strange. She attempted a giggle. It sounded wrong, coming from a troll. The troll did slowly plod away.

Valentine crept along behind, and he saw the byzantine throne room that he remembered in the USS _Democracy_. The decorations were redolent of atomic diagrams, skulls, properly dribbled candles, and suspiciously glowing goo. It was much as Valentine remembered it being, although someone had added offerings of toffee rats, limited edition cabbage-scented stamps, and what looked like a neon sign, although it was probably magic, because Valentine didn’t see a cord, softly winking in violent magenta.

He saw the troll tromping down a ladder. Valentine darted off to the left and grabbed a stimpack, a glowing blood pack, and a candle in a heavy skull candlestick. Then he went down the ladder, through a hatch, turned around aft, took another hatch, and found himself approaching the crypt. He listened to the voices.

“I’m not telling you anything.”

The voice was Vimes’s, seething with nuclear fury.

“I don’t expect you will, but Atom has provided. Mr. Heliotrope here can read your mind. Where did you put the launch key? I know you have it, you nasty fiend.”

Tektus. Not the Tektus that DiMA had crafted out of poor Cole. The original High Confessor Tektus, with all his sturm und drang. Who the Hell was Mr. Heliotrope?

Down in the crypt, the radiation wasn’t as bad as some parts of the _Democracy_ , but Valentine had to assume that Vimes was in a bad way. He gripped the candlestick tighter, trying desperately to suppress his panic and come up with something remotely resembling a plan.

A very smooth voice said, “He put the launch key in a vault in his cellar and poured concrete over it and then rubbed dirt on top. Also. There is an intruder.”

Valentine threw caution to the wind and burst around Sister Strange the troll, whom he judged to be too slow to do much of anything. Vimes was handcuffed down to one of the crypt bunks, surrounded above and below by headless skeletons. Sickly sweat dripped from him, and Valentine dared not put a name to what blazed in his eyes.

There was Tektus, the woman he’d seen at the docks, Dilibrat, an animate skeleton in Children of Atom attire, a dwarf similarly dressed, a male human cultist, and a weird fop in regal purple noble garb. Valentine tipped one of the crypt skeletons into the animate skeleton, hoping it would keep the skeleton confused enough as to which bone was which. The woman cried out, “Brother Down!”

Valentine dropped his lockpicks on Vimes and tried to tackle Tektus, but the damned dame got in the way. He slammed the candlestick into the back of her head, and she slumped hard against his chest, even as the dwarf went for his knees.

Vimes’s voice sounded fevered. “Nick?”

Valentine stepped down, hard, on the arch of dwarf’s foot, then kicked the dwarf in the knee and off to the side, as Tektus raised an Ankh-Morpork special crossbow at Vimes. He snarled, “Now die for your heresy!”

Valentine dove at Tektus as Tektus pulled the trigger. There was a sharp jolt of pain. “Not like this…” Valentine gasped. And there was nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: So I _finally_ finished the picture for chapter 1. [I'm linking the picture here,](http://jaylyn.hypermart.net/vvart/WH-CH1-OnTheOutside.png) or you can just go back to that chapter to look at it in context.
> 
>  **S:** The first pic in this chapter was done for us by [Jack of Legends](https://the-mercurial-star-o-vesper.tumblr.com/), for which we give our considerable thanks!
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	13. Love Lies Bleeding * Holy Enough * Playing Silly Buggers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Keep The Streets Empty For Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWFb5z3kUSQ&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=23) by Fever Ray.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Love Lies Bleeding * Holy Enough * Playing Silly Buggers_

“Brother Up, you heard Mr. Heliotrope. Get the key,” Tektus said coldly, as he reloaded. The golem departed, his tread heavy.

Nick Valentine, little angel of vengeance, was deathly still on the floor, oozing something purple, the light of life gone from his lovely amber eyes.

Vimes had picked his handcuff open in the clamor, and he launched off the narrow submarine bunk, slamming Tektus to the other wall. The crossbow clattered to the ground. He grabbed the back of the High Confessor’s collar and slammed him again into the metal bulkhead. He was about to slam him into it a third time when he saw the blood on the wall.

_Your love lies bleeding_.

Even if the golem had plodded off on an implacable mission, there was still the male human cultist, the gods-forsaken elf, the dwarf, and the troll. _Vimes_ was going to be lying bleeding, if he forgot about them! He flung a two-sided skull candelabra at the human and the dwarf, swiping the crossbow from the floor, which he pointed at the dwarf and the human.

The elf smiled beatifically. “This was fun. Was.” Then he seemed to vanish, though Vimes’s eyes watered.

“Run, Brother Bottom!” cried the dwarf, who was staring at the floor near Tektus, where the High Confessor’s blood had fallen into a pattern that looked something like a circle with an eye and a tail. 

Vimes pointed the crossbow at them. “No. You’re going to go find a Watchman and tell him to get some RadAway and RadX and give him very explicit instructions on how to find this place and tell him to get some golem Watchmen down here. Then you’re going to ask him to book you. If you don’t, if you run, I will find you, and if you make me do that, you’re going to be looking at Vetinari’s mercy, and he doesn’t have any.”

Then he let them run.

Sister Strange the troll roused somewhat, with a snort. “Uh… Hmm. Who turn out the lights?”

Vimes checked Tektus and the woman. They were breathing. They had pulses. That meant, he thought dully, that someone would have to arrest them. He took the handcuffs and cuffed Tektus’s right hand through a loop of metal piping and to the woman’s right hand.

Then he threw up. He still felt nauseous, dizzy, and overheated. Was it the radiation poisoning, the red rage, or the _grief_?

Before Vimes could black out and fall, he sat down on the floor where Valentine was sprawled, unmoving. A crossbow bolt stuck out of Nick’s forehead. Vimes’d gotten used to Valentine’s fans. He couldn’t hear them, even when he put his ear to Valentine’s head and his chest. Vimes sank on top of Valentine, and he wept. He found a stimpack in Valentine’s pocket, and he tried it on the synth.

Nothing happened.

He sobbed some more.

The dark whispered at him. It promised him names. Just pick up one of those skulls lying around, it said, and break Tektus’s skull open. The names were there in the blood. His numb, tingling fingers curled around an old bone, as he looked with tear-blurred eyes in the dark at the unconscious High Confessor and the stupid cultist he’d cuffed down to a berth.

But the dark had been loud in the icono-game, had called for brutality and then smugly told him what a monster he was, had tried to have him discard others as things for being monsters themselves, and _none of that had been real_.

Vimes was missing - _the Summoning Dark was distracting him from_ \- that the animated skeleton had put himself back together while he was staring at Tektus’s head. He spun, and he knocked the other over, back into a clatter of bones. Of course, he wasn’t actually an animated skeleton. Vimes could distantly remember Reg Shoe explaining about skeletons. What the living called animated skeletons were actually zombies who had lost or discarded their flesh. Calling them ‘animated’ was vitalism.

He giggled a little, thinking about Reg Shoe. He had to get out of here. Sooner or later, that troll was going to actually finish a thought. Vimes had been angry as a cat; now he was weak as a kitten. He dragged Valentine through hatches, up a ladder, past the flickering pink magic sign in the throne room, through another hatch, up the conning tower, and out.

_I know the way out._

Only, Vimes knew he didn’t. He knew Ankh-Morpork, its twists and turns. He knew that he could back-track a path blindfolded, and he knew he was under the University, and he knew that the tunnels under the University changed to suit themselves.

Captain Angua, with Dogmeat at her heel, found him then. She looked over Vimes and Valentine and observed casually, “That’s a walnut shaft bolt in Valentine, sir.”

Any half-decent copper had a devious mind, and Angua was very, very good.

Vimes looked down at the crossbow in his hand. It was his, given to him by Sybil as a wedding gift. After the golem Dilibrat had knocked Vimes out and carried him off to the _Democracy_ , Tektus must have taken his weapons. Tektus had been planning on shooting Vimes with his own crossbow? The nerve of it!

Tektus had shot Valentine with Vimes’s own crossbow.

Vimes said weakly, “The Children of Atom,” Angua would at least vaguely know of them, because the Watch had been on the look-out since that pitchblende deal, “got my weapons off me. Tektus, their leader, was going to kill me, but Nick took the shot for me. We need to get him to Igorina or Dr. Lawn or… I don’t know, we just need to get him to help.”

“We need to get _you_ to help, sir,” Angua said firmly, offering Vimes support as he walked. “Valentine’s beyond helping.”

“N-no,” Vimes moaned, leaning heavily against her.

_You should have killed them all. You would have, for Sybil._

_Nick wouldn’t want me to._

Angua didn’t argue. She was humouring him because he was sick and pitiful, Vimes thought.

“Oh. And we need some golem officers down here. At least four. It’s radioactive, a sort of invisible curse. That’s why I’m so ill.” Absolutely entirely why he had to stop and dry heave every few minutes, and nothing to do with the sorrow that was clawed so deep into his irradiated soul. “There’s Tektus, a human woman cultist, a troll woman cultist, and a skeleton cultist still down in there. Someone needs to book them. A dwarf cultist and a human male cultist ran off… we’ll catch them… we’ll catch them later...”

“I’m sure we will, sir,” said Angua, carefully.

“And someone needs to go get the golem Dilibrat and stop him from digging up my cellar,” Vimes added, feeling rather faint.

“Sir,” said Angua.

* * *

Valentine sat up and rubbed his forehead. He couldn’t feel the arrow. He couldn’t feel anything. This moment felt like every other moment, as if time had rotated 90 degrees and sidled up alongside width as a dimension.

Everything was foggy, and black sand was beneath him, but he could also see a teary Vimes, blotchy with radiation burns, leaning heavily on Angua and dragging Valentine’s body with him.

Death was standing there.

“Not like this…” Valentine had been saying.

THIS IS MOST IRREGULAR, said Death.

“He’s alive, at least. I hope that idiot takes some RadAway soon, though,” Valentine sighed.

YOU ARE ONLY SEEING ME BECAUSE WATCHMEN SOMETIMES SEE ME, YOU KNOW. YOU WOULDN’T BE SEEING ME, OTHERWISE, said Death.

Valentine picked up a handful of sand with his synthflesh hand, because it looked like it would get stuck in his gearing and take forever to clean out on the other side, but he had forever, didn’t he? This land was neither heaven nor hell. So he had to be in Purgatory, and him with no one to pray for him.

YOU ARE FLAGGED ‘ESSENTIAL’, said Death, sounding vaguely irritated.

Valentine didn’t know what that meant.

I AM ONLY HAVING A NEAR NICK VALENTINE EXPERIENCE, Death concluded.

* * *

At the Yard, Vimes irritably sat on a cell bed in a cell that Igorina had co-opted for him, the cells doing double duty as infirmary space when needs must. Igorina had hung a glass bottle of the RadAway that Cheery had crafted for officers who spent too much time on the troll drug beat, and the brown fluid was drip-drip-dripping into one of his veins. The angry red line on his PipBoy that indicated his radiation damage was slowly going down. Real-life RadAway didn’t work as quickly as it had in the icono-game; Igorina and Cheery thought the infusion was going to take a few hours. He had a pounding headache from how Dilibrat had bashed him into the cobbles, and he was sure the RadAway was only making his headache worse. It was definitely giving him stomach cramps on top of the nausea he already had.

Gods, but his heart hurt, and his eyes were red and puffy from the crying.

On the cell bed across from him, they’d laid out Valentine, his eyes open and dark, the crossbow bolt still stuck in his head, because frankly, none of them knew if removing it would do more damage.

“You said he’s a fancy sort of golem, sir. Maybe the bolt tore his chem?” speculated Captain Carrot, who was there now. Angua and Sally were off hunting. Carrot examined the seams on Valentine’s head, his trademark hat laid over his chest.

Vimes winced. “There’s words in his head, but they don’t work like that. He runs on… tamed lightning, I think?”

Igorina grimaced. “It’s winter, sir. Haven’t had quality lightning in months. I’ve got some late autumn lighting bottled, but I’m afraid it’s a bit stale. I’ll get him on a slab, but… we need to be calling his next of kin. His brother, DiMA?”

His brother, DiMA, and arguably, Vimes’s son Shaun, who was a Generation 3 synth based off the technology prototyped in Valentine. Or so the story went. And if Valentine had asked, and if Vimes had said ‘yes’, then…

But that hadn’t happened.

“Right. Yes. Someone clacks DiMA,” Vimes said dully.

Denial was a river in Djelibeybi, wasn’t it? Geography beyond Ankh-Morpork had never been his strong suit. This wasn’t a game. This was real. Valentine was dead because Vimes hadn’t paid enough attention to the mail golem walking up behind him. Valentine was dead because Vimes was too slow in picking the lock on the handcuffs. Valentine was dead because Vimes had let Tektus get a bead on him with his own bloody crossbow.

Vimes hadn’t been good enough for Valentine. He never had been. He sobbed some more, even though his eyes were dry and scratchy, like the thick woolen socks Sybil made.

Then he heard the faint sound of fans and a slurred, faint, “Thought there'd be more benefits to a metal skull...”

Valentine lurched into a sitting position, holding his head. 

Vimes stared, incredulous and not daring to hope.

“C’mon optics, don’t fail me now,” muttered Valentine, who gave the side of his head a slap with his synthflesh hand, and his optics flickered back on. “Just loose sockets, then, I -” his head swiveled, taking in the small infirmary, Captain Carrot, Igorina, and - “Sam.” He smiled, and the creases around his eyes turned impish. “Light-emitting isn't a great look on you. God, I’m glad you’re alive.”

Valentine reached up, pulled the crossbow bolt out of his head, and gave a pained grunt as it came out.

Sam slipped off his cell cot, tugging the RadAway hanging from its stand after him, and he narrowed the distance between himself and Valentine, and then he paused, leaving a question hanging between them. Kissing in anything remotely resembling public was difficult for him. It had taken him years with Sybil. He wasn’t even sure if Valentine wanted - no, Valentine closed the remaining distance and gave Vimes his answer. They kissed.

“You’re alive,” said Vimes, looking Valentine over. Valentine had a distressing hole in his head, and he smelled of the worst sewers, but so did Vimes. Vimes scooted himself up onto Valentine’s bed and leaned against him. “You don’t know -” _how terrified I was, how close I was to tearing each and every one of those bloody Cultists apart in grief over you_ \- “- you don’t know. Nick, what possessed you to do such a foolish thing?”

“Because ‘dead’ is an even worse look on you than ‘glowing’, sweetheart?” Valentine said flippantly.

It was at that point that Vimes remembered that Carrot and Igorina were in the room, and he snapped, using annoyance to cover his self-consciousness, “Nick just saved my life. He took a shot for me. He almost died!”

“You’re married to Lady Sybil, sir,” Carrot said, reproachfully.

“We’ll go home and talk to her,” said Vimes, looking at the RadAway drip speculatively. He was sure he could take the pole and walk home.

“Sir, you’re suffering from acute radiation poisoning, and Valentine has a hole in his head,” Igorina observed. “Neither of you are going anywhere.”

* * *

Dorfl caught up with Dilibrat who was, indeed, en route to the Vimes family cellar. All golems were uncannily quick, when they wished to be, but Dilibrat was merely practised at being quick with delivering the mail. Dorfl had studied delivering miscreants to justice. He got Dilibrat’s head open, and he pulled out a scrap of paper that read:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
IN THIS HOLY VESSEL  
THINK ON THE SACRIFICES  
OF OUR FAMILY  
AND RECALL THE SINS  
OF WICKED FAR HARBOR  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Either all words were holy or none were, but for Dilibrat, the words of the Children of Atom had been holy enough. Valentine and Flavours had found Dilibrat’s original chem. They could put it back in. What would the clay remember?

* * *

Pleasure never lasted long for Heliotrope. As swiftly as it came, it was gone again, and then he was bored. Pleasure and pain were not opposites to him; they were really much the same, and boredom was their true and implacable opposite. Once the Vimes human escaped, the outcome was foregone, but he might not have escaped. The Children of Atom might have recovered their Holy Relic, the launch key. They might have even used it. Now that would have been a story!

A story that Heliotrope would have carefully observed from the careful distance of a different dimension. Half-decent wizards could see elves for what they were, yes, looking past the glamour, if they tried. Half-decent. There was a whole half of wizards left to sucker, a glass of spoilt milk half-full. Heliotrope was still confident that he could waltz into the High Energy Magic building and convince some young idiot to use Hex and the Great Big Thing to run the thaumic reactor at full tilt and punch a hole in reality.

Heliotrope fogged the memories of the cultists in the Vessel. He didn’t want that nasty Vimes human finding him. The man was halfway, two thirds a demon, and that wasn’t his worse half. Heliotrope thought he might have to come back and do more than fog Tektus, though. Tektus liked the Fog, didn’t he? He thought the Fog was holy. Heliotrope could give him what he wanted. Elves could bring many blessings.

They could.

They never did.

* * *

Sister Top, really Hourgina Goldenbuckle, was a dwarf. Most dwarfs acknowledged Tak and the lore of their people, and they tended to be too level-headed for silly cults. Sister Top, though, had been a pitchblende miner. Someone had to be. It wasn’t glamorous, it didn’t pay well, it was largely illegal in most places, and pitchblende miners died young, their bones eaten away from the inside.37 She’d come to Ankh-Morpork because anything had to be better.

But pitchblende still spoke to her, sometimes. She’d fallen in with the Children of Atom before she knew what had happened to her. Ankh-Morpork did that to people, the big city sweeping them up.

She thought ‘Sister Top’ was an excellent alias for a dwarf. To a dwarf, to hit rock bottom was a fine thing indeed, and the high life was a horrible state. No dwarf would say she was on top!

Few dwarfs would say they were she, for that matter.

But despite the way pitchblende whispered to her in the dark and sang of a glow beyond seeing, Sister Top was a dwarf, and certain mine signs could not be denied. She shuddered to even think of it.

Brother Bottom was her human boyfriend, Duncan Maynard, but of course a human would never choose an alias like Brother Bottom. It was a perfect deception. A dwarf dating a human was a strange thing, but Sister Top, pitchblende miner, open female dwarf, was no stranger to ostracism.

Sister Top ran away with Brother Bottom and didn't watch where she was going, because human legs were a sea of trousers and skirts. She didn’t know what Bother Bottom’s excuse was when they bumped into a Watchmen who was either unlucky with pigeons or had a sergeant's pips.

She remembered the mine sign in the blood on the floor and the words spoken by the Dark, and she babbled, “We didn’t mean to do it!”

The sergeant gave her a tired, withering look and said, “That’s never a good opening. What didn’t you mean to do?”

“Hourgina -” Brother Bottom started.

“We didn’t mean to kidnap him! We just wanted to appreciate some ore!” Sister Top pleaded.

The sergeant’s eyes’ perked up with a certain cunning.

A man in purple bumped into Sister Top and Brother Bottom. She was sure she knew him. He was…

“Go on,” the Watchman prodded.

Sister Top couldn’t remember who the man in purple was. “I, ah…” She looked up at Brother Bottom, who looked a bit stunned.

“Playing silly buggers, are we?” said the Watchman, reaching for his handcuffs.

37 All mines have their signs, and pitchblende, with its sickening curse, has one as well, one shared by other mines with ores that have similar effects. The sickening glow that can't be seen with the eyes is called the Radiant Dark, and it is marked by a symbol that those of the Commonwealth would find familiar…

* * *

When DiMA received a clacks, courtesy of Hex, that his brother, Nick Valentine, had been gravely injured, he didn’t have the cultural context to know just how concerned he needed to be. Nick had been injured on the job before without DiMA receiving a clacks. Indeed, Nick had been punched in the Geiger counter. So DiMA had to intuit that this injury had to be somewhat more severe than the loss of a major sense. He had Hex print off a set of Nick’s schematics and the address for the gnome jewellers that Hex preferred when he needed new or replacement parts. Then he gathered his tools. 

When he arrived, Valentine was sitting on the bed of one of the nicer cells, with Vimes leaned against him, a RadAway drip hanging from a pole on wheels and infusing into Vimes’s arm. Vimes appeared to be dozing, but one eye opened as DiMA approached and then the other. Igorina was sitting on the other bed in the cell, doing something dubious with blueberries in a glass of water. The blueberries had jellyfish tentacles.

The only injury that DiMA could actually see on Valentine was a small tear on his forehead, but Valentine was fully clothed in his usual outfit, albeit soggier and smellier than usual.

“DiMA!” Igorina greeted.

“DiMA. Thanks for coming, but don’t listen to them,” Valentine gestured vaguely at Vimes and Igorina. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?” DiMA asked, planning on listening to them, anyway.

“Eh, I was slow, I was sloppy, I got shot,” said Valentine, shrugging. He rubbed his forehead.

“You took a shot for me! You saved my life!” Vimes protested.

DiMA kept his expression carefully neutral, as he sat down on the narrow cell bed on the other side of Valentine. He looked at the small tear on Valentine’s forehead and asked. “May I examine you?”

Valentine reluctantly took off his hat, putting it on his lap, and warned, “Uh, Sam, Igorina, you _might_ want to look away.” 

DiMA selected the correct sized screwdriver, undid the screws that held Valentine’s synthflesh down to his face and scalp, and he peeled it back gingerly.

“Look away? Why would I want to do that?” asked Igorina, baffled.

“Oh gods,” said Vimes, who did look away, and he doubled over, putting his head between his knees. He made retching noises.

DiMA took a moment to sort out what he was even looking at, with regards to the damage done by the crossbow bolt. He looked back at the schematics supplied by Hex, and he frowned, feeling a cold sense of panic and dread. Valentine shouldn’t have been functioning. DiMA discarded that conclusion, because here Valentine was, sitting on the same bed as DiMA and carrying on a conversation.

DiMA dared not even contemplate it too deeply. Wizards could put flesh on their imaginations. If DiMA thought too hard about it and Valentine suddenly dropped dead, DiMA would never forgive himself.

He’d add it to the list of things he’d never forgive himself over, anyway.

DiMA couldn’t help but wonder, though, if Generation 2 synths could become zombies. Humans could become zombies either through magical intervention or through sheer force of will, refusing to lay down until some task was completed. What would being a zombie even mean for a Generation 2 synth?

Igorina got in close while referencing the schematics. She asked, “So what are we looking at, here?”

DiMA checked the schematics again. Valentine’s regulatory systems were, literally, shot. He should have been dead, and his core ought to have melted down and exploded. DiMA gathered up the papers and said carefully, “I am going to go to Longshafts and Clasp, Jewellers, and have some new parts fabricated. Please try not to overexert yourself right now, Nick. I suspect that would be unwise.”

Vimes rummaged around for his cloak pocket, studiously avoiding looking at the internal contents of Valentine’s head. He pulled out his chequebook, signed and dated one, and handed it to DiMA.

DiMA took it, unfamiliar with cheques.

“You fill in whatever the cost comes to there,” said Vimes, pointing at a blank space.

“You just handed DiMA a blank cheque,” Valentine observed, optics narrowed.

“I know where he lives,” Vimes said, shrugging.

“Thank you,” DiMA murmured, placing the cheque into his inventory. “It may take some time to have these parts made, Nick. I am glad that you are…” he searched for an appropriate word, “...well.” He took Valentine’s hand and patted it. Then he closed Valentine’s head back up.

“So it’s not that bad? Probably just took out some cooling unit or some such?” speculated Igorina.

Then Lady Sybil arrived, and she rushed over to Vimes’s other side and sat down there making the narrow cell bed rather crowded, with, from right to left, Lady Sybil, Vimes, Valentine, and DiMA. Sybil looked at the RadAway drip and examined Vimes’s face and sighed, “Oh, Sam. Your skin’s peeling. I’ll have to rub you down with some burn ointment.”

Vimes looked embarrassed, blushing deeper than the radiation burns.

“I’d like to go buy those replacement parts now,” said DiMA evasively, and he stood, and he left.

Longshafts and Clasp were two gnome jewellers. Hex said that they did lovely fine detail work. Longshafts looked over the schematics, as DiMA explained what he wanted, and Longshafts looked increasingly unnerved. The gnome said slowly, “You’re talking about a… fancy golem’s… brain. The thing he thinks with. He needs that, yes? You know making new golems is banned? I mean, I can’t see why you’d need that.”

“This is going to be fun!” said Clasp, bouncing excitedly.

DiMA carefully held up the blank cheque. “Yes. I imagine it will be fun for you. When will you have my order done?”

* * *

“Igorina, if you could please step out?” said Vimes, as DiMA left.

“Will you make sure he doesn’t move about too much? I don’t want him ripping out the RadAway IV,” said Igorina to Sybil.

“Oh yes,” said Sybil.

“And will you make sure he doesn’t engage in any straining or heavy lifting?” Igorina asked Vimes of Valentine.

“Yes. I’ll sit on him,” said Vimes, eyeing Valentine speculatively.

“Then I suppose,” Igorina said, sulking, “but I’m coming back and assisting when DiMA gets those replacement parts.”

“And Fittly, Chert, Brakenshield, and Jolson, I know you’re around the corner, listening. Out,” said Vimes flattly.

The four called-out Watchmen guiltily trooped by.

Vimes listened for a moment. “Reg. You too. Out.”

After Reg walked past, he listened some more.

“Who did this to you?” Sybil asked, frowning.

Sam started, “This goes back to the _Aftermath_ Wars icono-game. There was an island with a town called Far Harbour. The island had a cursed radioactive Fog that periodically rolled over it, which attracted the Children of Atom, a cult that worshipped radiation. They wanted the Harbourfolk, who already lived there, to leave. They also wanted to convert them, and they’d send missionaries, and the Harbourfolk would kill the missionaries, you know, as you do…”

Sybil nodded along.

Sam continued, “And then the Children of Atom would want the Fog to come and kill the Harborfolk even more, because the Harborfolk were killing the Children of Atom missionaries.”

“Meanwhile, the island's where my brother lived. Not in either of those communities, but in his own community of synths, Acadia,” said Valentine.

“Ye-es, which meant it was a very messy three-way political situation,” Vimes said hurriedly.

“You’re good at those,” said Sybil, patting his hand.

“...I’m not so sure about that. I ended up, ah… talking the leader of the Children of Atom, Tektus, into exile. I made it back to Ankh-Morpork. The icono-game was shut down. Or so I thought. Lady Rust commissioned that it be restarted, and because it had once pulled game elements into Ankh-Morpork, it became easier for it to do it again, and it started doing it at random, and it pulled in Tektus.” Vimes rubbed his eyes. “He did what every exiled cult leader in Ankh-Morpork does and restarted his cult. Now, we knew the Cult of Atom was here,” he looked to Valentine, nodding, “and we were keeping our eyes out. I’d just talked to Vetinari,” he scowled, thinking about that talk, “and I’d gone on patrol, when a mail golem picked me up, put me in his sack, and thumped me on the ground.”

Valentine added, “Which was Dilibrat, who’d been missing for a while. I’d been looking for him. Flavours and I had already found his _chem_ , the holy words that make a golem alive, but, ah… I suppose that maybe Children of Atom holy words can work as a replacement?”

“So I woke up handcuffed down in a crypt in a… ship-thing. You know. Boat. Tektus wanted the location of the launch key,” said Vimes.

“Sam, we have to go get that key, we weren’t the only people who heard where you’re keeping it -” started Valentine, about to stand, when Vimes moved over and sat on his lap.

Vimes wrote a note and called, “Swires! I know you’re there. Come run this message off for me.”

The six-inch high corporal emerged from his hiding spot in the ceiling, took the note, and headed off.

“I’ll have Willikins take one of Sybil’s hottest flamers to the launch key,” Vimes reassured.

“Why did you even keep it?” Valentine pressed.

“It was just a key!” Vimes said defensively.

“Keys can come in useful,” Sybil agreed.

“Not that key!” Valentine argued. “Anyway, so, I saw the Watch all-call on the clacks, showed up, and it was in the area along Dilibrat’s mail route, and I already suspected that Dilibrat might have been taken out of that area by the sewers when he was kidnapped, because golems are a small minority in Ankh-Morpork, although one of large stature, and they stand out. I called Dogmeat to help me, and he tracked Sam through the sewers up to an intersection, where someone’d dropped an anise seed bomb. Frankly, it made the sewers smell a whole lot better. That’s where I started following my Geiger counter. I found Sam with Tektus about to kill him -”

“With my own crossbow! The one you got me!” Vimes interjected.

“That’s very rude,” Sybil agreed.

“There was a bit of a scuffle, I got shot, and I guess Sam got out,” Valentine concluded.

“Now, the golem had left - Dorfl’s going to go get him - but there was Tektus, who’s a human, two more human cultists, a dwarf, a troll, and a fleshless zombie, and Nick waded into all of that. For me,” said Vimes, gazing at Valentine with respect and adoration. Then he coughed, “which was very foolish and reckless of him.”

Since Vimes had scooted on Valentine’s lap, Sybil was sitting on Valentine’s right, and she half-turned and hugged Valentine, murmuring, “Thank you for looking after my husband.”

Valentine looked awkward and excused, “Ah, well, Captains Angua and Sally were pretty close, too. If it wasn’t for that anise bomb, they’d have found him.”

“But you were there. How can I repay you?” asked Sybil.

“I don’t need anything,” Valentine said firmly. “I’ll scrape together some cash, and I’ll go to Fourecks - I’d actually been about to board the _Milka_ , when I saw that all-call and handed my ticket off to someone else - and you won’t have to worry about me causing trouble for you and Sam ever again.”

Vimes froze. There was what he’d been dreading to hear, stated plainly in simple form. Valentine was going to go away, and Vimes would never see him again. He’d lose him, entirely. Vimes mumbled weakly, “N-no, you don’t need to do that…”

Valentine sighed, “Sam. Yes, I do. You’re a good man who’s done a great job cleaning up this city, and your job is gonna get a lot harder if the whole city is up in arms because you kissed a fellah and you liked it. I need to go away so they can forget. Plus, there’s Sybil to consider. She didn’t sign up for this. I don’t want to embarrass her any worse than I already have.”

“You saved my Sam’s life. I wouldn’t have him now if not for you,” said Sybil. “There must be something we can do for you.”

“Not gonna take ‘no’ for an answer, huh?” said Valentine.

_NON SVMET NVLLVS PRO RESPONSO_38 was, in fact, Sybil’s personal motto.

“I insist,” said Sybil, smiling.

“Y’know, once we’re both feeling a bit better, Sam could show me around the city. He promised me he was going to show me his city, and I wouldn't mind seeing it one last time through his eyes before I go,” said Valentine.

“I thought you two might have talked,” said Sybil, looking thoughtfully at Vimes on Valentine’s lap. “You haven’t?”

“About what?” asked Valentine, slightly confused.

Vimes had talked with Sybil. He’d planned on talking with Valentine, seeing if he was still interested in a courtship, if they could work something out, but Valentine had just said that he was leaving! Vimes was going to lose him, forever. 

Sybil sighed and shot a look at Vimes. “When you two go on your walk together, that might be a good time to talk.”

“About _what_?” Valentine repeated, increasingly confused.

Vimes steeled himself. Valentine hadn’t left yet, and even if there wasn’t a chance of anything happening, Valentine deserved to hear certain words. “I’m sorry, Nick. I mistreated you. I shouldn’t have avoided you so much. When I arrived with you back in Ankh-Morpork, I should have sat down with you and Sybil to… talk. Really talk. You’ve been better to me than I deserve, and I wish I could start on trying to repay you.”

“Oh, uh...” Valentine rubbed the back of his head. “You’ve both been pretty nice about it.” He looked to Sybil. “You, in particular. You didn’t have to be.”

“Nonsense. You deserve every courtesy. You’re a lovely person, Mr. Valentine. I’m lucky you were there to look after my husband,” said Sybil.

Haddock poked in, announcing, “Sir, Dorfl’s apprehended Dilibrat. After an evidence examination, we’re going to turn him over to the Golem Trust to see if his original chem can be put back. Some other golem officers pulled the remaining cultists out of that underground ship and are taking them in for lockdown, so that’s the one you described as Tektus, a human woman, a fleshless zombie, and a troll accounted for.”

Vimes scooted off Valentine’s lap, guiltily, and nodded at the update. “So we’re just missing a dwarf and another human…”

Haddock hesitated. “I did arrest a dwarf and a human, Ms. Hourgina Goldenbuckle and Mr. Duncan Maynard, who were dressed a bit like cultists. They were playing silly buggers, talking about a kidnapping… uhm, they’re at the Dolly Sisters Watch House. I figured I’d let them cool off.”

“Get me sketches,” said Vimes, sharply.

“Yessir,” said Haddock, ducking out.

Vimes leaned back against the cell wall, his hands itching. He wanted to be out there, arresting that pack of idiots, but his men were doing a good job bringing them all in. Vimes didn’t know what Vetinari would do with the Children of Atom; they would surely go to him for trial and not any lesser judge. Kidnapping, conspiracy, and attempted murder were serious crimes.

Then he remembered that he’d been trying to apologize to Valentine, who wouldn’t just accept the bloody apology. “I thought you’d be happy to be rid of me.”

Valentine looked startled. “No. Never. Why’d you think that?”

“You’re, ah, religious. I have caught you praying, when you thought I was asleep. Asking for forgiveness,” Vimes said mildly.

Valentine rubbed the back of his head again. “I, ah… I guess I can see where you got the idea. But no. It was swell enough, still being friends. I wish I could stay. I just can’t justify making your job any harder than it has to be, and I know that the League of Decency, the Temple of Blind Io, the Temple of Offler, the Temple of Om, and any number of nobles, Guild leaders, and businessmen are going to be calling your judgment into question over me.”

Sybil sniffed. “Sam made a perfectly reasonable choice in courting you. Dependable, hard-working, well-mannered...”

Vimes could already tell that Sybil was going to write letters to a large number of people, very soon.

“That’s sweet of you to say…” started Valentine, looking uncomfortable.

DiMA returned, which meant that Igorina also came out of the woodwork.

38 _She Won't Take 'No' For An Answer_

* * *

DiMA and Igorina flanked Valentine on either side and peeled back the skin on his head again, as DiMA gingerly extracted the damaged components. Igorina commented, “I’ve seen plenty of brains and done surgery on them all, but this is the first synth I’ve worked on.”

Sybil and Vimes had moved over to the other bed in the cell and were resolutely looking away.

“Here’s hoping you don’t have to work on a synth noggin again,” Valentine muttered.

The replacement components were very lovely, fine craftsgnomeship. DiMA dialed back his shocking grasp cantrip to channel just 120 volts through his soldering iron to set the new pieces into place.

“Thaaat tickles,” said Valentine, suppressing a giggle. “Where’d you find a working battery-powered soldering iron, anyway?”

“I… didn’t,” DiMA admitted. “You know, I did miss what happened to occasion this circumstance of you with a crossbow bolt through your head and Commander Vimes on a RadAway drip.”

Valentine again briefly explained, with intermittent interjections from Vimes. He made it as far as mentioning the _USS Democracy_ beneath Unseen University, and DiMA made Valentine back up and explain the steps he’d taken to find the _Democracy._

Knowing how the tunnels beneath Unseen University rearranged themselves, accounting for the phase of the moon, the currently available constellations, and the distinct lack of cheese, that meant the _Democracy_ was… 

DiMA concluded, “You are informing me that the _USS Democracy_ , a nuclear submarine, with a nuclear reactor and nuclear warheads, is underneath Unseen University’s thaumic reactor.” 

Vimes looked up, a bleak expression on his face, looked at Valentine’s primary processor repairs still in progress, and looked away. He grumbled, “Oh, hells.”

DiMA did some more calculations. “Oh. Hrm. That’s unfortunate. Igorina, if you’d pass me the bayoneted forceps?”

Igorina did, as DiMA adjusted the fit between two components that had never been designed to be replaced. Really, they hadn’t been _designed_ to be anything. No one had sat down and drafted out and prototyped a functioning synth. Some wizard students had made up a story about that happening, and the story had become real, but that meant that there was a distinct lack of design-work in Nick and DiMA’s construction.

“What’s unfortunate?” asked Nick.

“A nuclear explosion underneath the thaumic reactor would trigger a chain reaction that would destroy the Disc,” DiMA said softly.

Sybil went pale. Vimes called, “Sally, I know you’re over there. Make sure some of the golem constables are stationed around that submarine. No one in or out.”

“Yes sir,” said Sally, smiling slightly, as she stepped out of the darkness and walked off to carry out that order.

“Uh,” said Valentine.

“I would like to offer my help in decommissioning it. I am familiar with the layout and technology, and I am unharmed by radiation,” said DiMA. He had memories of living in the Vessel, a home he’d never had in truth. Now the Vessel was underneath his current home, Unseen University. Why did karma keep coming after DiMA over actions he hadn’t actually undertaken?

Then he remembered his own guilt with regards to restarting the icono-game and the incursions _Aftermath_ had drawn into Ankh-Morpork. The Vessel wouldn’t be underneath Unseen University if not, in some part, for him. DiMA had a duty to make amends for that, as best he could.

“Oh,” said Sybil, who sounded slightly shaky, “Isn’t he helpful?”

Vimes thought about DiMA’s offer of assistance. “I suppose you really are the best option for taking that wretched thing apart, aren’t you?” He glared, nonetheless. “I’ll tell the golems Sally assigns there to give you access.”

“I will need some lead boxes for containment of the radioactive materials,” DiMA speculated, testing a few of the soldered joints. 

“I can find some good suppliers on lead boxes,” Igorina offered.

“So you tracked Vimes to the Vessel…” DiMA prompted gently.

Valentine also sounded shaky, “...oh, yeah. Yeah, Tektus wanted to get the location of the launch key from Sam -”

DiMA turned fractionally to look at Vimes, who had chosen to exile Tektus, rather than killing him as DiMA had suggested. “I seem to recall mentioning to you that your solution with regards to Tektus was not ideal.”

“Oh, it’s ‘I told you so’ now, is it?” Vimes snapped. “You’re the one who just left the launch key lying around and then forgot where you put it!”

“Yes. Which was not ideal, either. You might have learned from my mistake,” DiMA said mildly, double-checking the grounding wire set-up.

Vimes crossed his arms huffily. “I’m having someone destroy the launch key now. It’s all getting sorted, in the end.”

DiMA checked over the schematics again, conferred with Igorina, and suggested, “Nick, if you could run a diagnostic for us, before we close?”

DiMA heard the distance in tone and pitch of Valentine’s systems. Then Valentine came back up and said, “Checks out all right. I’m not coming up with any faults or error messages.”

DiMA then looked at the small tear on Valentine’s forehead, which had belied the much more extensive damage within Valentine’s metal calvarium. A good crossbow could punch a bolt through steel at close enough range. DiMA thought aloud, “Unfortunate that we can’t hide the laceration in a natural skin fold. I don’t think any rotational flaps will be of benefit, however. Nick, you will have to deal with a new scar.”

Igorina looked at DiMA with a calculating stare, and she asked, “Do a lot of plastic surgery, do you?”

DiMA had been left with a rather baffling set of skills, taken out of context. He’d remade Cole into Tektus, hadn’t he? Faraday wasn’t involved in that. DiMA didn’t want his darling’s hands to be unduly stained. Which meant, logically, that DiMA had to know how and be able to make someone like Cole look like someone like Tektus. What he’d been written as doing, in remaking a synth into Captain Avery, he’d been written as doing alone. DiMA admitted, with some reservations, “I wouldn’t term it as a ‘a lot’.”

DiMA eventually decided to reapproximate the laceration with some Wonderglue. They closed Valentine, and he picked up his hat and put it back on. Igorina checked on Vimes and his PipBoy and looked up at the bottle of RadAway hanging upside-down and said, “Ought to have you back up in a few minutes, sir.”

“Guess I’ll go shower up and change into something cleaner,” said Valentine, standing.

“Do you need a change of clothes?” asked Sybil.

Valentine patted his old, battered, sewer-drenched trench coat. “I’ve got a change with me. The pockets on this hold a weirdly large amount. I didn’t even need luggage when I packed up to leave.”

“You have pockets of holding?” said Vimes.

DiMA wondered if he ought to explain that, no, Valentine had game inventory access via his pockets. But no. A charlatan didn’t explain his own tricks. As he packed up his tools, Igorina asked, “You free next week?”

* * *

On the other side of the wall were Fittly, Brakenshield, Chert, Jolson, and Reg, who’d been joined by Sally, who, as a vampire, could hear quite well through the wall. She was very interested in this particular gossip.

They were all being nosy. They were coppers. It was in their job description.

“I don’t hear shouting,” said Jolson, who was a large woman of Howondaland descent. “Any of us would be able to hear shouting through that wall.”

“Shh,” said Sally, her ear up against the wall. “They’re just… talking.”

“Is Lady Sybil doing that thing she does when she gets upset where she gets very quiet and reproachful?” asked Reg. “And then you just feel horrible?”

“Oh yeah, one time I forgot to clean out the tea pot, and Lady Sybil was over, and well…” said Brakenshield.

“Not really?” said Sally, who’d been lurking in the other room when Lady Sybil had said, ‘Sam made a perfectly reasonable choice in courting you. Dependable, hard-working, well-mannered...’ “No, Mister Vimes is arguing with that DiMA like they’re in-laws… oh, no, they’re wrapping up now, better scatter! That’ll be Valentine headed for the wash racks.”

* * *

Sally scattered towards the front office of the Watch House. She had thought she’d heard a familiar voice coming from that direction, and sure enough, there was Piper Wright trying to argue her way past Lance Corporal Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets, one of the few Watchmen who could be relied on to run the front desk in the face of the drama happening in the back and not sneak off to eavesdrop.

“But they’re my _friends_!” Piper protested. “Look, I just want to check if everyone’s all right.”

“None-the-less, you are also a member of the press, and I can see that you have your notebook out. So until I’ve been asked to let you past, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the official statement,” said Visit.

“Rrrrgh!” Piper made a noise of frustration and stomped her foot. Then she looked around, apparently searching for something she could leverage… and she spotted Sally. She rushed over to the vampire. “Sally! C’mon, tell him he’s got to let me by to talk to Nick!”

Sally raised her hands in an attempt to placate the reporter. “Piper, I don’t think that’s a very good idea right no- ooop!” And then Sally stepped past Piper, putting herself between the reporter and the group who had just entered the room. As first Lady Sybil Vimes, then Mister Vimes, followed finally by Valentine, whose plastic still had a few droplets from his shower, came into view, Sally smiled brightly and gave a smart salute. “Glad to see you’re up and about again, sir!” Then she nodded towards Nick. “You, too, Constable.”

Nick looked ready to say something, but it was Sam who asked, “Thank you, Captain. Erm… so what are you doing?”

Sally’s smile broadened. “Just trying to keep the press from intruding on your recovery, sir!” She could feel Piper’s glare on the back of her neck. Oh, Sally was going to pay for that one. Visit, who had been the Watchman actually manning the desk when Piper arrived, also gave Sally a dubious look.

Piper attempted to move past Sally. “Nick! Sam!” she started, but then Sally grabbed her. 

Sally couldn’t let Piper get in the way before they’d finished sorting things out, not from what she’d overheard! Her grin turned almost manic. “I, uhm, should probably give the press a formal statement about what happened, shouldn’t I?”

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Nick observed with dry amusement, although he still seemed rather tired. Lady Sybil covered her mouth, as if to hide a not-entirely-appropriate smile, while behind Sally, Piper sputtered.

Mister Vimes sighed and rubbed his nose tiredly. “Yes, uhm… you take care of that, Captain.” Then he looked up at Sybil. “I’ll see you later, dear.”

“Of course, Sam.” Then Lady Sybil moved past her husband to give Nick Valentine another hug. “Thank you once again for saving my husband’s life.”

“Wait, he did what?” Piper asked, while the synth rubbed the back of his head.

“I’m, uhm, just glad we were able to find him in time,” Valentine said, sounding one part embarrassed and one part confused, as if he were sure he was missing something. Then Sybil left, and Valentine and Vimes left, and before Piper could follow them, Sally grabbed her arm.

“No, I’m serious. We need to give them space for a bit, and you’re going to want to hear this, anyway.” She gestured towards the upstairs offices with her head and Piper reluctantly followed her.

“Sally, I’ve really got to talk to Nick before he has another chance to leave! When we were putting together the interviews back at the Times, I found out Sybil said something that he _really_ needs to hear! Or… unless maybe they already told Nick?” she asked as the two entered the office that Sally shared with the other Captains and with Vimes. Angua was out in the city making sure there weren’t any more Children of Atom that they had somehow missed, and Carrot had decided to check on the other Watch houses after he verified that Cheery and Igorina had everything under control with Vimes’s recovery, so for the moment they had the office to themselves.

“Told him what?” Sally asked as she offered Piper a seat. Sally sat on the edge of a desk rather than taking a chair.

“Sybil told de Worde that she’d be okay if Sam brought home a second partner, as long as she approved of him! She even said ‘him’!” Piper tilted her head and looked thoughtful. “Kinda surprised he didn’t ask a follow-up about that, actually.”

“Yes!” Sally shouted, punching the air. Then she cleared her throat. “I mean, uhm… that’s good to hear, and I hope they’re able to talk the issues between them out like adults.”

Piper grinned. “Well, that hug sure didn’t look like disapproval to me!” Then she dropped the grin and lifted her pencil. “But what’s going on, anyway? We heard something about the Commander getting kidnapped, and something about a cult?”

Sally nodded. “That’s right. The Children of Atom grabbed him. Apparently he had something they wanted from his time in the icono-game.”

“Are you _serious_?!” Piper exclaimed. “ _Them?_ So those rumors about the Children of Atom being one of those incursions are true?”

“Actually, I think most of these were locals,” Sally shrugged. Then she continued to give Piper what was more or less the full story, minus a detail here or there that Sally worried might cause a bit of a panic if they got out. Why get the people of Ankh-Morpork worked up over what was already dealt with? 

* * *

After Igorina let the both of them loose, Vimes and Valentine wandered Ankh-Morpork under the dark sky. Back in the game, Vimes had promised Valentine that he would show him the city, and he hadn’t. That was the only actual promise he’d made Valentine, and he’d broken it. Now, three months later, he was making good on it and showing Valentine the city, although he found he didn’t actually know where to take him.

He started with a bar where “Washable” Topsy, a reliable Watch informant who did the laundry at the Assassin’ Guild, could usually be found. No one really recognized Vimes there; he was just a disreputable Watchman, but Valentine was recognized as being ‘that clockwork abomination what seduced the Duke’. Valentine was impolitely asked to see himself out and ended up even less politely dragging Vimes out, insofar as Vimes objected to Valentine being called an ‘abomination’, and he had a blackjack that also objected, and Valentine objected to Vimes taking a blackjack to people.

Besides. Seduced! Like Vimes couldn’t get himself into marital trouble all on his own.

Vimes pointed out an arch as they passed it by, gesturing vaguely, and he said, “I don’t know. It’s an arch. Carrot goes on about it.”

“Yeah, Battle of Crumhorn?” supplied Valentine. “The enemy were persuaded to sell their weapons.”

“Ah. You’ve heard, then,” said Vimes, gloomily. Valentine had made himself right at home in Vimes’s city.

Vimes tried the Royal Art Museum, because he knew five different ways to get in through the back door. Valentine had been there, several times, he admitted, and he animatedly told Vimes all about the symbolism of _The Goddess Anoia Arising From the Cutlery_ and the use of light and shadow and the hidden details in the reflections on cutlery. His eyes glowed brightly as he explained, “Y’see, the painter hid a reflection of a rat, which symbolises -”

“That he had a rat infestation in his studio?” Vimes suggested cynically.

“Which symbolises that the painter held sympathies for the dwarfish people,” said Valentine sharply, “and may have intended this as an apostolic missive to spread Anoia’s message to the dwarfs.”

Vimes said slowly, “You’re saying this painting is missionary style?”

It didn’t even have any urns.

He tried to take Valentine around an old music hall that he’d been to when he was young. It wasn’t there anymore. The city had burnt down a few times. What was there now was a small grocery. Embarrassed, Vimes bought a few onions. The house could always do with a few onions.

Then they tried the Flea-Pit Music Hall. Valentine had been there before. Valentine was promptly asked to leave.

Vimes was avoiding a lot of brawls, mainly because Valentine was dragging him away from them forcibly.

They loped along the rimward side of the Plaza of Broken Moons, where they saw the opposing embassies of the dwarfs and the trolls. They passed by the Bureau of Measures and the Barbican, which had been refurbished as ‘government offices’. Vimes admitted, “I don’t actually know what they’re for. It’s probably sinister.”

“Eh. Yes and no,” said Valentine.

Vimes looked at him.

Valentine admitted sheepishly, “Uh, I… showed myself in at one point. There’s just tax records and civic planning stuff in there.”

Vimes gestured vaguely at the city. “This is planned?” He hated to see what unplanned looked like.

“No, not really. But there’s a lotta speculation on how it could be,” said Valentine. “Mostly underground.”

“Ah. The Undertaking,” said Vimes. That was going to be a Thing. Someday. Probably soon, although hopefully the nuclear going-underwater-boat would be dealt with first. The whole business was going to be a staffing headache for him, he was sure.

Then they passed by the Bad Penny and the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes squinted. In the distance, he could see Von Lipwig climbing about on the roof of the Bank. Valentine also looked that way and said, “Uh. That guy supposed to be up there?”

“It’s just Von Lipwig. He does that,” Vimes sighed. Some people were more guilty than others, and then there was Von Lipwig. Vimes shook his head.

The Street of Small Gods also turned out to be a bad choice. Valentine was apparently an obscenity unto both Offler and Io now. Vimes would have found that rather enchanting; he quite enjoyed his obscenities, but it meant Valentine manhandling Vimes away from another fight-in-potential.

They ducked down Short Street, where Valentine tossed some small coins to the beggar urchin for a chance to borrow the beggar’s chalk, where he spent a few moments crossing out a number of recently chalked messages that made Vimes’s blood boil. Valentine handed the chalk back to the urchin and tipped his hat.

They passed by the Mended Drum. Vimes asked, “Did you want to go in?”

“Not really,” admitted Valentine, “it’s too touristy.”

“Right,” said Vimes.

They avoided Brewer Street but came across the Dysk, where Valentine sighed, “I caught some great plays there. And more terrible ones. But they were fun. Y’ever go?”

“Sybil prefers the opera,” said Vimes.

Valentine studied Vimes a long moment, and he hazarded, “I think you might have liked _Miserable Les_.”

Then they passed by the Yard, circling back to where they’d started, and Valentine looked at it, trembling slightly, and Vimes thought that Valentine might cry. He turned and ran, and Vimes followed him at a pace behind, to give him his space. He ran past the Opera House and the Tanty, where Tektus would soon be, and off into Hide Park, where Vimes found him. He offered, “Why don’t we go to the Bucket and talk?”

* * *

Once Piper left the Watchouse, she dropped off notes about what she had learned from Sally at the _Times_. Piper had certain questions to ask with regards to how pictures of ol’ Nicky and Blue had ended up in the paper. De Worde wouldn’t tell her. She did, however, have a lead. She wanted to talk to those student wizards she’d seen when she had been brought to this world. It was easier to think of it that way. It was easier than thinking about her own fictionality. A beer or two and a night out with Sally usually chased those thoughts away.

Piper didn’t have many reasons to go to Unseen University; a different reporter covered much of the news there, but she knew from him that the easy entrance was the servants’ entrance in the back. A plump woman assessed Piper and assessed that it would take up less of her time if she just gave Piper directions rather than arguing. Even following the directions, Piper ended up lost a few times. She walked through doors where, if she looked back, there was nothing but wall. It was unnerving. Eventually, Piper made her way to the High Energy Magic Building.

The odd Generation 2 synth known as DiMA, Nick’s brother, apparently also had questions for two of those student wizards. The two student wizards looked alarmed to see Piper, but it wasn’t the usual alarm of one who did not wish to see the press.

“Who keeps letting women in here?” complained the Agatean one. Piper’s notes reminded her that he was Xian Ju.

“All doors are open to the press,” Piper said breezily. “I’m Piper Wright, with the _Ankh-Morpork_ _Times_ , if you could just answer a few questions for me.”

“No, Piper Wright’s with _Publick Occurrences_ ,” the one that Piper had noted down as Zinon Elias corrected owlishly.

DiMA gave Zinon a mild look.

“...uhm, hullo, Miss Wright,” Zinon said sulkily.

Piper held up the newspaper that showed Nick and Blue getting up close and personal. It was old news, now. The kidnapping was the next big thing. Anti-golem sentiments, always smouldering, were certain to flare. Yes, Blue’s ‘affair’ was old news, but it was personal to Piper. She asked, “Either of you boys,” they were both a bit older than her, but her choice of ‘boys’ was deliberate, “know how these pictures ended up in the paper?”

Zinon had the blank incomprehension of someone who had only recently woken up. Xian did as well, with an undercurrent of anger, but there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes. _Gotcha._

Zinon said muzzily, “That’s not a very good render. Too much bloom.”

Xian said hotly, “I don’t know anything about it - and you take that back, Zinon, you’re just peeved that you can never figure out floating point buffer frames!”

“I still say that there’s no reason why Hubflowers can’t be used as a substitute!” Zinon snapped.

“Sounds like you know a lot about something you don’t know anything about,” Piper observed.

“Hubflowers produce an unacceptable kernel -” Xian started, then he looked at Piper warily. “This is too complicated for, ah -” He gestured vaguely.

DiMA said quietly, “Hex has access logs.”

Zinon continued to look confused, and he helped himself to a cup of coffee. Xian, though, winced as DiMA walked over to Hex. DiMA’s fingers hovered over Hex’s keyboard, and DiMA added absently, “The access logs will tell a story. One might consider that the option to tell one’s own story provides a modicum more control.”

“Uhm, look, you have to understand, I hadn’t slept in weeks. And that wasn’t my fault! That was Faculty bullying!” Xian said defensively. “I know how bad it looks, now that I’ve had a sleep. I just… couldn’t string two thoughts together.”

“And you gave the iconographs to the paper?” Piper asked.

Xian blinked. “No. Lady Rust asked for them, and I gave them to her. I thought she had rubbish taste in romantic fiction, like Zinon.”

“My taste in romantic fiction is philosophically sound and axiomatically unassailable!” Zinon argued.

“You think shapeshifting into a penguin is seductive!” Xian accused.

‘Lady Rust’ went into Piper’s notebook, underlined. “Why was Lady Rust here?”

“Oh, she donated money to the University because she has _impeccable_ taste in role-playing games, and she wanted her own version of _Aftermath_ , and she was checking on progress,” said Xian.

“So Lady Rust was involved in the chain of events that led to Common… to icono-game incursions into the city?” asked Piper, kicking herself that Unseen University was O'Biscuit’s reporting turf. She’d have at least some interesting tips to pass on to him; maybe he’d have something for her as a trade. While the icono-game incursions had been covered, the money trail back to Lady Rust had not.

“I think, from a teleological perspective, I can confidently say… it was _all_ her fault,” said Zinon, steepling his fingers.

Piper circled back, “And Xian, you mentioned something about Faculty bullying?”

Xian looked nervous and said, “No, I’m sure I didn’t. Uhm, also, is it too late to change my name to Anon Nymous? It’s just, I really wouldn’t want this getting back to my parents in Bes Pelargic...”

DiMA inquired, “If you’re with the paper, shouldn’t you know where the iconographs came from?”

Piper sighed and admitted, “Y’know, I really just wanted to know who was causing trouble for Blue and Nicky, because they’re my friends. But that’s all old news.”

“So. Er. You don’t need to tell everyone I gave Lady Rust those iconographs?” Xian said hopefully. “Again, I’m… sorry,” a difficult thing for a wizard, even a student wizard, to say, “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d been able to think it through.”

Piper bit her lip. “No. I don’t think I do.” De Worde probably already knew, anyway. “But O’Biscuit might have some questions about Lady Rust for you.”

It might go nowhere, though it burned Piper up. Interest in the icono-game was already waning, and Lady Rust had power. Faculty bullying also sounded like a story, but Xian and Zinon clearly didn’t want to talk about it. She realized, belatedly, that it might be a bad idea to warn them about O’Biscuit, but she had what she wanted - the person who had given Rust the iconographs hadn’t been malicious, just sleep deprived. Rust must have supplied the malice herself.

Piper looked over at DiMA for a moment. It was funny how he did and didn’t look like Nick. Neither of them looked quite like a standard Generation 2; some of the facial sculpting was different, even putting aside wear and tear. It was odd to think of Nick having a brother. She’d known Nick for years; what felt like years, anyway. “Sally told me you and Igorina got Nick patched up?”

“Hex provided schematics. The jewellers Longshafts and Clasp did the actual fabrication,” DiMA said absently.

He was an eerie thing, wasn’t he? DiMA looked almost as friendly as Nick, but it had taken Piper a long time to get used to Nick, and she knew that she still slipped up and said things that hurt Nick. She said awkwardly, “Well… that old bucket of bolts means a lot to me, so thanks.” She offered DiMA her right hand.

DiMA took it and shook delicately, but she noticed that his right hand was in better repair, unlike Nick, whose right hand was in worse shape. Maybe he was left handed? They walked a bit away from the student wizards, down a hallway with round windows that were on the wrong side when compared to the exterior of the building. The filtered light was faintly blue. He replied, “Nick is my brother. I could not have done anything else.”

DiMA didn’t come to - or possibly wasn’t invited to - their Commonwealth get-togethers, like the last time they all played cards. He wasn’t Commonwealth, exactly; Piper understood that the battered old synth was from near Far Harbor. Now she wondered why that distance was there.

“I, ah… hope Nick and Blue - that’s what I call Sam - get things patched up,” Piper ventured.

Reflectively, DiMA said, “I hope Nick is able to obtain an outcome that provides him with personal contentment.”

“Oh come on, Nicky and Blue are great together!” Piper protested, picking up the subtle insinuation there.

“Perhaps,” said DiMA, shrugging one shoulder.

“You don’t want Nick to go to Fourecks, do you?” Piper asked.

“It might spare him some pain,” said DiMA.

“Sybil said she might let Blue have a second partner -” Piper started, still excited by that piece of information.

DiMA said tiredly, “Commander Vimes terminated his relationship with my brother and refused to listen to him with regards to my brother’s wishes. Forgive me if I question the sagacity of resuming relations.” He paused. “Forgive me if I question the timing of any potential resumption.” He touched the bridge of his nose.

The cat was out of the bag. The truth was in the light. All of Ankh-Morpork knew that Sam and Nick had engaged in a romantic relationship. How would it feel to Nick, if he and Sam only talked it over when Sam had nothing left to lose? Piper’s face twisted with unhappy thoughts. “Aw, c’mon. It could still work.”

DiMA observed in a reserved tone of voice, “Many things can work. Not all of them should… nevertheless, we stand in the Department of Inadvisably Applied Magic. I will refrain from throwing stones.” He sighed. “The last time Alf tried to hit Zinon with a stone, it turned into a swarm of bats.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: Yes, the code names of the Children of Atom cultists correspond to Roundworld quarks: up, down, top bottom, charm, and strange. Quarks are, after all, what one gets when one splits an atom. 
> 
> S: We figure that if the Long Dark can have a mine sign that just so happens to coincidentally resemble the symbol used to mark the London Underground, there can be other mine signs that coincidentally resemble well known symbols in Roundworld, too.
> 
> **Jack of Legends has created some wonderful fanart for the series, including a panel inspired by last chapter.[Please, go check it out on Tumblr,](https://mercurialeveningstar.tumblr.com/post/625620459982028800/a-series-of-fanart-sketches-for-the-fanfic-series) and give them some love!**
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	14. No Dog in this Fight * Not Even Micromail * Implications * DiMA & Taxes: Day 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [The Night We Met](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQh9eDcS1-0&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=24) by Lord Huron.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_No Dog in this Fight * Not Even Micromail * Implications * DiMA & Taxes: Day 1_

Valentine settled down uncomfortably in a sticky old booth, with a weak, bad beer, which he wished was a weak, bad whiskey, across from Vimes, who had a depressing ‘lemonade’, which was actually a fizzy drink. Why did Mr. Cheese have to be out of whiskey? A number of off-duty Watchmen were watching them with interest and pretending that they weren’t. Given that rumors from their conversation in the Yard would already be circulating, Valentine thought that some of the previously on-duty Watchmen had suddenly found excuses to be off-duty. Vimes was nervously playing with something in his pocket. 

After a bit, he seemed to summon some courage, and Vimes said, “Under the correct lighting,” probably purplish-pink, “what you did looked very romantic and not at all like a good man throwing his life away for a bad one. And people are suckers for romance and then promptly forget it as soon as it turns into domesticity. I won’t stop you if you really do want to go to Fourecks, but… this is something I should have asked you sooner. Will you marry me?”

From his pocket, Vimes pulled out the duplicate wedding ring from the game, the one that had originally been on the simulated dead Sybil, and he held it out. Valentine knew it would probably fit. It was funny, how clothing in the game always adjusted to fit. It was something Valentine should have noticed sooner.

Valentine half-rose, placed his hands flat on the stable, and he snarled, “That’s not funny, Sam.” How dare Sam do that to him? How dare Sam do that to him here, in the Bucket, in front of co-workers that Valentine respected, that he’d put his life on the line for, that he’d never see again now, because he had to leave? Where did Sam get off on mocking him like that?

“I’m not joking, Nick. I’m serious,” said Vimes, and there was a slight shake to his outstretched hand, and a pleading edge to his eyes.

“You can’t be serious,” Valentine growled, anger pitching in his fans and circulating in his coolant. “You’ve seen how people are reacting to me.” As a slut. As a monster. “They think I’m some twopenny tramp sent to ruin you. There’s so much good you’ve done for this city and so much good yet that you could do. I’ve told you, I can’t be a part of a scandal that gets in the way of you doing your job. I have to go away so this can all die down and you can get back to your life.” Nick slumped back down on the booth bench.

Vimes said earnestly, “One, damn the scandal, you deserve this, if it’s what you want. Two, if you’re looking for this to die down, there’s nothing more uninteresting than stably married people.”

“But we’re both men!” Valentine protested. He supposed the Patrician had legalized that just recently, but legal didn’t necessarily mean plausible.

“It’s legal now,” reminded Vimes, “And there’s precedent for that, too. Sybil says you’d be a Marquess. Terrible thing to inflict on a man, a title is.”

Valentine’s optics cycled a blink, as he realized that meant Vimes had discussed the matter with Sybil. Now he understood what Sybil meant, as they’d both been recovering, when she’d asked Vimes if he’d talked to Valentine. Some of the off-duty Watchmen who were pretending not to watch seemed to also notice that Vimes must have discussed the matter with Sybil. 

Vimes really was serious, then. Valentine’s auxiliary fuel tank felt queasy and it wasn’t just the weak, bad beer that was bubbling away in there. Vimes was really asking Valentine to marry him. If he’d asked back in the Commonwealth, Valentine would have said, ‘Yes,’ in a processor tick and climbed over the table and smooched Vimes one and one and a dozen.

And then they would have arrived in Ankh-Morpork, and Lady Sybil would have been there with young Sam.

Valentine slumped on the booth bench. He reminded, “You’re already married, Sam. It would be bigamy. You can get transported for bigamy.”

“Depends on which parish where you marry. A while back, a contingent of Klatchians were able to successfully argue that multiple wives are Cultural for them, and the Zoons seized on that, too. They’d been waiting for centuries, really. Then when the goblins were emancipated, it worked out well enough for them,” recounted Vimes, who’d apparently been doing some studying.

“I’m not Klatchian or a Zoon or a goblin,” said Valentine. “Bigamy’s… not done, in my religion. It’s against the Council of Trent.”

“Who’s Trent?” asked Vimes, with an appraising look on his face. He seemed to be trying to decide if he could take Trent in a fight.

“Trent is - was a city. Which I suppose never actually existed. But that’s besides the point,” said Valentine, irritated that he was off-track. He knew Vimes was prone to jumping to bad conclusions because of what little he knew about Valentine’s religion, and here Valentine was, going back to citing his religion in a way that rather justified Vimes’s assumptions. He was upset and all fluttery at the same time. “You’ve got a wonderful wife. Top-notch gal.”

“I do,” agreed Vimes, without hesitation. And he’d gone to her, without hesitation, when they’d arrived here, and he’d spent three months avoiding Valentine until Valentine had happened to save Vimes’s life.

“So why do you want to marry me?” Valentine asked hoarsely, staring down at his drink.

Vimes had done his studying, but he didn’t seem to have anticipated that question. He eventually said, “You’re a good copper.”

“I understand that’s the highest praise you can give anyone, and I sincerely appreciate it, I really do, but,” Valentine sighed, “y’know, Reg’s a good cop, too, and I don’t see you proposing to him, unless I missed something.” Also, Lady Sybil wasn’t a cop at all.

“You saved my life,” Vimes said readily. That would certainly be fresh on his mind, just like Igorina’s Wonderglue equivalent was fresh on Valentine’s forehead.

“I didn’t do that because I love you. I would have done that for anyone,” Valentine said flatly. He noticed some of the off-duty Watchmen noting that he’d said he loved Vimes. He still did. It was a sort of pointless, self-defeating love, but it was there. He was the sort who would love a dead woman who’d never known him for a century. He was entitled to his pining and his one-sided attraction.

There was a glimmer of something in Vimes’s eyes at Valentine’s casual mention that he loved him. Vimes had to think some more. “You’re honest, basically decent to all people…”

“So’s Carrot,” Valentine pointed out.

Vimes pursed his lips. “You’ve got a good sense of humour.”

“So does Detritus,” observed Valentine. What Vimes was saying were all things that applied to plenty of other people. Vimes hadn’t given one reason that would have singled Valentine out of a crowd.

Maybe that should have been enough. It was more than enough for most people. They married because they got along, and that was good enough. They married because she had vast tracts of land. They married to seal a business merger. They married because they were already in the family way. They married to stop their warring kingdoms. 

And it would be convenient, Valentine had to admit. He’d enjoyed being a father to the boy that Vimes and Sybil were calling Shaun, and the boy missed him. Valentine didn’t like the thought of hurting the kid by leaving. He liked Sybil and young Sam well enough. DiMA frankly needed someone checking on him from time to time. Piper and Nat and Deacon and Codsworth and Dogmeat were all in town. Valentine liked the Watchmen he worked with, or he had liked them; some of them seemed liable to turn ugly upon realising that Valentine was bent, the way that other people of the city had turned upon him. But despite that, Ankh-Morpork had caught him under her spell. Valentine loved the city, and he didn’t want to leave.

But Nick Valentine was also a hopeless romantic.

Vimes managed, “You have nice eyes.”

Valentine’s optics brightened and blinked. Werewolves and golems came close, from different directions, but he was the only one in town with optics like his. 

Vimes continued, voice quiet, “And you seem lonely. And we fit together well. We made good partners.”

Valentine’s fans stopped for a moment. He replied softly, “All right.” That had to be enough. Vimes wasn’t good with emotions, Valentine knew.

“All right?” Vimes queried, with trepidation.

“All right, I’ll marry you, Sam,” said Valentine, who reached across the table to take Vimes’s outstretched hand. 

A look of relief flooded over Vimes, and Valentine could see, by its passing, that Vimes had been quite terrified. He patted Valentine’s hand awkwardly. Then he fiddled with Valentine’s ring finger, checking to see if the ring fit, which it did. Valentine hadn’t doubted that part. He could have done with Vimes giving him a kiss. He could have done with Vimes saying he loved him. Valentine didn’t think he was going to get either of those things, but he had Vimes’s hand on his, and he had a bad, warm beer, and Vimes had a horrible fizzy fake lemonade, and they sat there together in the quiet. Vimes gave him a weak but genuine and grateful smile.

This was going to be difficult, but Valentine didn’t have to say that. Maybe the furor would die down eventually, like Vimes thought it would, and maybe it wouldn’t, but either way, the next little bit was going to be Hell, and Vimes had to know that. Perhaps Valentine would be going there when he died, if he had a soul. That wasn’t a pleasant thought to have over his engagement, but Valentine had it, nonetheless.

Eventually, Vimes said, “I know you, uhm, got thrown out of your apartment. You might move in with us. We certainly have the room, and well, I did move in with Sybil before I married her.”

Valentine blinked. He hazarded, “That’s awful kind of you, Sam. Sure?”

Vimes nodded, and they were quiet again for a while. Then he casually mentioned, “I never signed your resignation paperwork. At least partially on account of being kidnapped. You’re still employed by the Watch, and you’d better head out soon, or you’ll be late to your shift.”

Thinking about the ordeal they’d just gone through and how Igorina had not so long ago released them from medical observation, Valentine looked at Vimes incredulously and sputtered, “You’re going to propose to me and then make me work the rest of the night?”

Vimes demurred, “I’m sure I wouldn’t dream of treating you any differently than any other Watchman.”

* * *

Vimes walked home in a cautiously cheerful mood. There were a number of large, looming stones stacked up, and at some point, some idiot was going to holler, and there’d be an avalanche, but he knew at least what a few of those stones were, and he’d be ready to step aside when they came tumbling down. Sybil met him at the front door, where she’d been waiting, and she fussed over him, and then asked carefully, “Where’s your Mister Valentine? You asked him, didn’t you?”

“Er. Yes,” admitted Vimes, blushing. He still felt a bit guilty about it all. Sybil was rather too good to him, and a significant portion of him had expected Valentine to turn him down on general decency principles.

Sybil continued looking at him, and he expected that she would keep that mild gaze on him until he went on.

“He agreed,” said Vimes.

“So where is he?” asked Sybil.

“I don’t know, possibly a septic tank?” Vimes hazarded, thinking about the patrol proclivities of Valentine. “He’s on a night shift with… Hrolf Thighbiter, I think?”

Sybil touched her fingers between her eyes and said wearily, “That man is going to leave you at the altar, Sam.”

* * *

Valentine ran back to the Yard and opened up his locker, grabbing for his uniform. What he found was a bundle of sticks tied together. There were a number of words to describe such a collection of items. One was _fasces_ , a symbol of authority. There was a fasces on the Vimes crest. There was another word, which ultimately derived from the same stem as fasces, which Valentine didn’t want to say aloud, didn’t even want to think in the privacy of his own plastic-and-metal skull, and he suspected that other one was the intended meaning.

He looked around the locker room, and he knew who’d put it there. It wasn’t hard to figure out. Grimacing, Valentine reflected that he was in a right sticky situation. If he complained, he was a snitch, and if he didn’t do anything about it, then he was a _pussy_ , and worse, he’d be setting a damn dangerous precedent for any of the other bent members of the Watch, if he let that little nitwit get away with it. As far as bent members of the Watch went, there was Sally, of course, and she did fine for herself; she was a vampire, and it was practically expected. There was Commander Vimes, apparently. There were a couple of dwarfs Valentine was pretty sure about. Statistically speaking, there had to be a few more, and maybe Valentine didn’t know who they were because they didn’t want to end up with a bundle of sticks in their locker. Why couldn’t people just have a little respect?

Valentine set what was definitely not a fasces on one of the locker room benches and changed into his uniform. There was sniggering from some, and some unpleasant muttered comments, and Valentine marked down their names in his head. Then he checked and re-checked his crossbow, his truncheon, his sword, his clacks paddles, and his other gear for any ‘humorous’ alterations. He didn’t find any. There was that about Watchmen; they might put a slur in his locker, but they wouldn’t screw with his gear. Valentine checked the crossbow again.

He put the crossbow up and then asked in a polite, inquiring tone, “Hey, Fittly, why’d you put a bundle of sticks in my locker? I’m not a dryad. I don’t get the joke. Maybe you could explain?”

Fittly did not look at all pleased to have been called out. He also didn’t particularly look like he wanted to explain the ‘joke’, possibly because it was a slur and not a joke. “I didn’t put the fa… er...” Fittly became aware that something with glowing amber eyes on a black background was staring intently at him, and that did things to his monkey brain.

Valentine took a step toward him and put the bundle of sticks in Fittly’s hands and said quietly, “If I was a dryad, I could just talk to these sticks and find out, but I’m going to rely on the fact that you were snickering when I opened my locker, and you’ve got some splinters under your nails and you do this shit to everyone. Don’t do that again, Fittly. To anyone.”

Then he went and found Hrolf Thighbiter, who looked at him dubiously. It was an awkward patrol, but at least Hrolf didn’t make any unpleasant comments, but then, Valentine had covered a shift for him last month. They took down a statement from a jewellery seller, who was claiming that an unlicensed thief had stolen a genuine Ankhstone bracelet, which she valued at $100, which led to a spirited argument, because Hrolf knew his gems and metals, and he said it couldn’t be worth any more than $50, to which she said it had definitely been $200, come to think of it. As they argued, Valentine looked out the window at a local clacks tower and idly decrypted the messages.

* * *

Meanwhile, gossip did spread, and there’d been plenty of Watchmen at the Bucket. Personal wasn’t the same thing as important, Carrot often said, though not as often as he used to. Angua thought that Carrot had decided that what Commander Vimes did with his personal life wasn’t important, anyway, since Carrot didn’t seem to have any particular reaction to Vimes proposing to that Unalive Constable.

What was important, though, was that people were treated fairly, even if Captain Carrot didn’t approve of what they were doing, and Angua didn’t really think Carrot approved. She didn’t really approve, herself. Oh, wolves weren’t nearly as monogamous as humans liked to think they were, and male wolves would often mount other male wolves when the alpha bitch was in heat, but Valentine, he was nice enough, she supposed, but he was Unalive.

That probably wasn’t what Carrot was thinking, with his own disapproval. It was probably something about Tradition.

But that wasn’t the matter at hand. The matter at hand was that someone had put a faggot in Valentine’s locker, and while Valentine hadn’t told anyone, gossip did spread, and it had spread far enough that it officially had to be Dealt with. Captain Sally couldn’t deal with it, because she was obviously biased, and Carrot _could_ deal with it, but if he dealt with it, people would go along with what he said because he was Carrot, and that wasn’t a reasonable basis for anything.

Angua thought it was a reasonable basis for some things.

They weren’t going to go wake up Commander Vimes for it because he’d go spare.

So Carrot had asked her to deal with it, because she was the wolf who didn’t have a dog in this fight.

And so Captain Angua had made the statement that referring to another Watchman - or another citizen, for that matter - as a certain f-word, even in a sideways fashion, would have the same consequences as if they’d called a dwarf a b’zugda-hiara or a troll a rock. She felt that would about cover it, coming and going.

* * *

They did wake up Commander Vimes for something different, a matter at the Tanty. He went running down there, where Constables Hacknee and Mica were on scene with Mr. Wilkinson, who was one of the more pleasant Tanty Warders.

Wilkinson explained, “Sir, it’s about that Tektus. There was one of them clerks what came to see him, you know, that the Patrician sends around to question people, only this one wasn’t quite black in his dress, when I think back on ‘im. No, he was more very dark purple. And quite fetching?” Wilkinson looked puzzled. “After that, Tektus has been, well...”

Wilkinson opened the door and let Vimes in. Tektus was staring at nothing at all, eyes fixed. His breathing was regular. When Vimes tried nastily to sneak up on him from the side and flung a hand close up to his face to startle him, there was no reaction at all.

“It like him get hit in head with brick,” said Mica.

Vimes turned to Hacknee and directed, “Go signal the nearest clacks and get me DiMA from Unseen University. Tell him there’s another one.”

* * *

DiMA came with his schoolboy satchel full of ritual gear and slight sorrow on his face as he took in Tektus. He withdrew from his bag a cup of what looked suspiciously like spit or possibly bad beer, dipped his synthflesh thumb in it, and held it up in the air, looking thoughtful. DiMA turned to Vimes and said, “Commander Vimes, I suspect that my presence here is a mere informal formality. I would tender that you already know what happened.”

“I’ve got a good guess,” Vimes grunted, arms crossed. Tektus would have been hanged, once the Dark Clerks had gotten him to sing and give up who his co-conspirators were. Anyone could see that outcome on the horizon. Vimes couldn’t even say that what had happened was worse than hanging. It was just that the administration thereof was disorderly, and he hated that. Also, it meant that they didn’t know who his co-conspirators were, and that bloody elf was still out there on the loose.

DiMA pulled out an odd device and fiddled with it and declared, “The glamour quotient here is what would be considered to be at dangerous levels.”

Hacknee said, “What, these old uniforms?” He picked at his chainmail. “It’s not even micromail, that’s all the rage these days.”

“I mean that the magic of the Fair Folk has been performed here,” clarified DiMA, and he advanced into the cell and knelt in the straw before Tektus. He shook his head, and he reached out his metal left hand and let his fingertips dig into Tektus’s scalp, his milky grey eyes unfocusing. After a moment, he proclaimed, “He’s been wiped, like the other. He will live for a while, I think. If looked after.”

He shot a sidelong glance at Vimes.

Vimes met that sidelong glance with a full-on glare and said, “That’ll be up to the Patrician. It’s out of my hands.”

DiMA packed up his equipment and jotted down a few notes in a notebook, looking mildly distressed. Then he asked, “I am given to understand that you asked for my brother’s hand in marriage?”

“Er. Yes,” said Vimes, who had been hoping to avoid the issue of Valentine’s brother in this sense for a longer period, possibly indefinitely.

DiMA stood up, looked at Vimes directly, closed the distance slightly, and said mildly, “I hope you make him happy.”

It sounded like a threat.

* * *

Vimes didn’t sleep much after that. In the morning, he still felt oily from the yellow burn ointment that Sybil had slathered all over him. Willikins, who usually warned him about the contents of the newspaper as he was reading highlights to Vimes as he shaved in the morning, failed to give Vimes a heads-up. Instead, he went blithely on with the headline, which was -

Well, the headline was about as unflattering as Valentine had warned Vimes it might be, he thought, as he cussed softly and tried to hold pressure on where he’d slipped and cut himself with his granddad’s cutthroat razor. He held it a minute as Willikins condensed the rest of the news and then held up the political cartoon.

Vimes sucked in a deep breath. There was him, Valentine, and Sybil, and…

“She’s already asked you to get the original, hasn’t she?” Vimes asked.

“Her Ladyship may have, sir,” Willikins said mildly.

“Of course she has,” Vimes said wearily. He tried, but Sybil usually got to him first when it came to asking Willikins to send a servant boy down to the Times to buy up political cartoons that involved him. He’d have to prevail on her _not_ to hang up that particular one and to, instead, put it in a part of the attic that their sons would never find.

There was a black carriage waiting outside for him. Vimes sighed. He didn’t even have time for muesli with Sybil and the boys. He might have taken that chance to explain to them a little bit about… that… er…

In any case, he soon found himself in the Oblong office.

“Sybil has told me all about the incident with young Sam at Mort Lake,” Vetinari started.

“Inquiries are proceeding, sir,” said Vimes, gritting his teeth and wishing he’d had time for coffee.

“There was the bat-dragon,” Vetinari continued.

“The scorchbeast, yes, sir. Dealt with. As was the icono-game that was causing those incursions,” said Vimes, trying to curtail the next point that Vetinari would inevitably make.

“Then you were kidnapped by the golem Dilibrat, who had been induced to follow a cult leader called Tektus because the holy words of his _chem_ had been switched for a different set of words?” Vetinari asked lightly.

“That’s what we think. I hope you’ll take that into account, that Dilibrat wasn’t himself, in judging him, sir,” said Vimes. He really meant it. He couldn’t blame a golem who had been utterly _violated_ like that.

“And you contracted acute… ‘radiation’ poisoning from a Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device that is lodged under Unseen University,” Vetinari segued smoothly.

“I took my RadAway, I’m better, and I’ve asked an… expert to take the Going-Under-The-Water Device apart,” it wasn’t a Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device. If anything, it was a Going-Under-The-Water- _Unsafely_ Device, but really, it wasn’t going anywhere, “and dispose of it in a hygienic fashion, sir,” supplied Vimes. Actually, DiMA had volunteered. Vimes didn’t ask him. It was close enough for government work.

“And this Tektus, whom you allege as the ringleader of a conspiracy to kidnap you and blow up Ankh-Morpork, has been found with his mind emptied out,” said Vetinari.

Vimes slipped and said, more candidly than he wanted to, “I’ve had a bad Ick, sir.”

Vetinari eyed him. “You asked a nonhuman male to marry you.”

“That part wasn’t so bad,” Vimes muttered, caught himself, and added, more loudly, “sir.”

“If you go through with it, you will inflict a nonhuman Marquess of Ankh on this city. Do you understand the implications?”

Vimes went with honesty. “No, sir.”

“He is a… Generation 2 synth? Do you even know how long they live?”

“No, sir.”

Vetinari just looked at Vimes for a moment. “Do not give me occasion to regret this. Now, don’t let me detain you.”

* * *

Sybil took tea with Havelock at least once or twice a month. He’d been very interested in all of Sam’s new friends, and for her part, when they weren’t discussing the price of imported prawns from Genua or the Muntab question or which of her swamp dragon breeding lines seemed the most promising this year, she loved to regale him as to how her young Sam and Shaun were doing at school. Shaun was very, very clever. While he could always fall back on being a gentleman of leisure, as Sybil and Sam had no need to press him into either the military or clergy, he had already expressed interest in Guild membership with the Cunning Artificers. The boy sincerely wanted to make useful things. That would be a change for the Guild, she supposed.

Her boys were not the topic over tea now.

“You don’t object?” Havelock inquired gently.

Sybil shook her head. “No. It’ll be better this way.”

Havelock sipped his tea and quietly looked at her.

Sybil sipped her tea.

“He doesn’t understand the political implications of a nonhuman Marquess of Ankh,” said Havelock.

“Uberwald is known for vampire and werewolf nobility, and some of the werewolf noble families stretch as far as Genua. The dwarfs have their Low Queen, the trolls their Diamond King -” Sybil started.

“This is Ankh-Morpork,” Havelock said mildly.

“It’ll adjust,” Sybil said confidently. “Scone?”

Ankh-Morpork would have to adjust. Her Shaun was her flesh and blood, but he wasn’t human, and Sybil would see to it that he had the inheritance that he was due. Her Sam didn’t understand the political precedent a nonhuman Marquess of Ankh set. Sybil did.

* * *

When one of the bledlows entered the laboratory, Alf, Xian, and Zinon all started the complicated dance of ‘Not It’, but it didn’t matter, anyway, because the bledlow, a heavyset yet spry old gentleman, went right for the synth industriously grading a stack of papers. DiMA looked up and said mildly, “If this is about Being Found Objectionably Sober again, I must protest that I am constitutionally incapable of drunkness.”

“Y’know, if that’s your constitution, you might want to try for an amendment,” suggested Alf, relaxed now that he was sure he was Not It.

“Not this time, you scallywag,” said the bledlow. All students were scallywags to bledlows. “This time there’s a Watchman to see you, and he’s not your brother.”

Wizards were somewhat insulated from the law of Ankh-Morpork, but DiMA was not, technically speaking, a wizard. He was a grader. He shrugged and said, “Very well,” and followed the bledlow to one of the University gates, where there was a Corporal waiting for him. At one time, DiMA would have said the man looked Chinese, but now, he recognised him easily as Agatean, although likely from a different province than Xian.

The Watchman looked at him dubiously and asked, “DiMA, is it?”

DiMA inclined his head in a nod.

“You’re to come with me to the Palace, then,” said the Watchman. “I’m Corporal Ping, by the way. It means watermeadow.”

Nick had, at one point, sat DiMA down and told him that if a Watchman who wasn’t him or Sam - Nick had some interesting blind spots with regards to Commander Vimes - came around that DiMA ought to state he wanted a lawyer and then fall silent. The flaw with Nick’s advice was that DiMA could not afford to even look at a lawyer, let alone retain one. So he talked to the Watchman, anyway, asking, “I do not suppose you will tell me why I am to accompany you to the palace?”

“No, I don’t suppose I will,” replied Ping as they walked. “Say, you look a lot like that hussy Constable Valentine.”

DiMA turned a look on Ping that was one part withering and one part bewildered, and he said softly, “Nick Valentine is my twin brother.”

“Oh! Well,” Ping looked awkward, “You must know that he’s no better than he ought to be, really, seducing our poor Commander down the wicked path of bigamy.”

DiMA sized Ping up, and he asked slowly, “Could I interest you, Corporal, in changing your mind?”

Ping looked at DiMA, who was at once very inhuman and very unlike anything else that was inhuman in Ankh-Morpork. Even the Igors only had a few neck bolts. DiMA was also wearing a thin silvery robe with little pale gold lightning bolts, the one Lady Sybil had gifted him on account of Decency. Ping looked abruptly concerned that DiMA intended to be literal with his comment, and he said, aghast, “This is a trick question, isn’t it?”

“I just wish to point out that the Agatean Empire has a long history of concubines,” started DiMA.

“But concubines are different,” argued Ping, “and how would you know that, anyway?”

DiMA smiled faintly. “I have a friend from Bes Pelargic.”

“Bes Pelargic! They’re weird in Bes Pelargic,” Ping sniffed.

“Now then, Corporal, how are concubines different?” asked DiMA.

“We-ell, for one thing, concubines are _ladies_ ,” said Ping.

“May I also remind that the passion of the cut sleeve derives from the ancient Agatean Emperor Han McSweeney, who, when his lover, Attendant Hong, was sweating in a very important game of crockett on a particularly sunny day, cut off Hong’s sleeves so that he would have a breezier outfit and be better able to compete in the game, thereby inventing the tank top and propelling Hong to crockett victory?” said DiMA. Xian just would not shut up about Emperor Han McSweeney and Attendant Hong. They were one of Xian’s O.T.P.s. He’d made DiMA edit a whole zine of them.

“Your friend would get himself arrested if he talked about that sort of thing in Bes Pelargic!” said Ping, wide-eyed.

“Yes. He is aware, which is why he discusses it in Ankh-Morpork instead,” said DiMA wryly. 

“Anyway, look, your brother’s not Agatean,” Ping snapped.

“The point remains, and you have not refuted it, Corporal, that powerful men may take male lovers in addition to their wives. This is a simple fact of history. Both Emperor Han McSweeney and Attendant Hong were married,” said DiMA. Xian had an essay on how their wives were just ‘beards’, and DiMA had told him that was probably offensive to dwarfs. Nothing was ‘just’ beards to dwarfs.

“Commander Vimes wouldn’t have done it,” Ping said mulishly, “Valentine must have tricked him.”

“Be rational. If my brother was a… hussy capable of seducing a married man, would it not make more sense for him to seduce an unmarried man of greater status?” DiMA pointed out.

That suggestion made Ping’s face go blank, as the man tried to unwill his imagination from imagining what it was already imagining. Ping whispered, “ _The Patrician?_ ”

DiMA considered that a moment. He’d meant Ridcully, actually, but living on the Unseen University campus, of course, DiMA would. Granted, the concept of Nick Valentine seducing Archchancellor Ridcully was one that called for just as much mental bleach as the concept of the Nick Valentine seducing the Patrician…

Luckily for DiMA, he didn’t have to remember anything he didn’t want to.

“Now then, Corporal. You believe your Commander to be an honest and honourable man, do you not?” said DiMA, who was starting to think he had Ping’s number. It took a bit of conversation, a bit of studying cadence, to get it down.

“Yes, of course, Commander Vimes is incorruptible,” said Ping fervently.

“Then there you have it,” concluded DiMA.

“Eh?” said Ping.

“You just said it. Your Commander Vimes,” that self-admitted monster who had broken Nick’s nonexistent heart and then scooped up the pieces to keep for himself, “is _incorruptible_. Clearly, my brother cannot have corrupted him. Now, how do you think your Commander Vimes would react to you calling his fiance a hussy? I can scarcely imagine an incorruptible man would handle that well.”

Ping stared bleakly. “Oh no. Vimesy’s going to go nuclear on me.”

It was _fascinating_ how quickly the term ‘going nuclear’ had filtered into the Ankh-Morporkian patois. 

Ping turned to DiMA and pleaded, “Please don’t bring this up? Y’know, I’ve rethought things, and if Constable Valentine and the Commander are engaged, that’s really none of my business, is it?”

“I currently see no reason why I would bring it up,” said DiMA carefully, with the unsaid threat hanging in the air, _Do not give me cause to bring it up, Corporal Ping._

He’d sighted the Patrician’s Palace from blocks away, but finally, they were there. It was an impressive building, but there was a certain charm in general to a city that had only been burned, never bombed out. Corporal Ping handed DiMA off to a Palace Guard, who looked at DiMA and started, “Hey, doesn’t he look like that tramp -”

And Ping cut him off with, “Don’t you say that about the Commander’s fiance!”

DiMA steepled his fingers and turned an innocent look on the Palace Guard, inquiring, “Could I interest you in changing your mind?”

“I don’t mind a bit of philosophy, now and then,” said the Palace Guard, leading DiMA up a set of stairs and down a long hallway on the Turnwise Broadway side of the Palace, “but this is a very short walk to the rest of your life. Here’s your stop.”

There was a heavy wooden set of double doors, one of which opened, showing an oblong office. Out the window, DiMA could see the Tump Tower. There was a severe-looking man, who reminded DiMA of nothing so much as an elegant heron, dressed in black, with a Death’s Head cane. DiMA recognized him from the stamps. A studious-looking man stood next to him.

Wizards did not bow. DiMA was not, technically, a wizard. He bowed smoothly, and he wondered which of the things he had done or which of the things he was written as having done had led to him ending up in this particular room before this particular man.

“Mr. DiMA. A… grader at Unseen University,” said the Patrician. “A few weeks back, you did a favour for the Watch, which was distinctly not magic, because if it had been magic, the Archchancellor would have had you by…” He narrowed his eyes and then just waved a hand. “Well. It should have been most unpleasant for you. The wizards take a very dim view of that sort of magic.”

DiMA said nothing for himself. A man was back alive with his family, and the rent was paid for their apartment, and there was food on the table. DiMA had checked. The wife had given DiMA a funny, strangled little look and said that her husband was a gentler man than she’d remembered him being.

“And the Watch has asked another favour of you - to dismantle a Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device under the Unseen University?” said the Patrician.

“The Vessel? Yes. I offered to help,” admitted DiMA.

“And you are qualified to do so?”

“Yes,” DiMA said simply. He planned on putting in at least a few hours a day on it. He’d already started on the nuclear missiles and had one taken apart and in lead boxes. Where they were going to put the lead boxes, they were not yet sure.

The Patrician searched DiMA with his gaze, looking for false cocksure confidence. What he saw, he did not reveal, but he continued, “Coppers gossip as much as old women. I do not suppose that you have heard the news about Tektus?”

DiMA had heard. He’d been there. He nodded mutely. 

“A lack of a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and now, Mr. DiMA, we find Tektus not in possession of his. Could you print a mind on him?” asked the Patrician.

DiMA admitted, “Theoretically, yes, but I see no reason to do so, your lordship.” He suspected that the Patrician was going to give him a reason, and he was already prepared not to like it.

“And I, Mr. DiMA, see many reasons to do so, not the least of which is that the masses need their bread and circuses. The people of Ankh-Morpork need to be reassured that all _is_ well,” said the Patrician.

“But it isn’t,” DiMA said quietly.

“And you may even be allowed to know that, if melancholy suits your constitution, but nonetheless, the masses must see justice done, or the idea of justice, at least. They must see Tektus walk the gallows, and they must see him die,” said the Patrician.

“They should like that, I am sure. I am not certain they need it, your lordship,” said DiMA thoughtfully. The idea of a thing was very much different than the actual thing, especially when concepts such as justice were involved, and DiMA remembered being written as one who knew what it was to have a crowd baying to see his life spilled out on the street.

“They absolutely do need to see that a man who would kidnap the Watch Commander will meet a swift, short end after a long drop,” said the Patrician.

Sam Vimes would have seen DiMA dead, if it would not have cost the life of Kasumi Nakano and other innocents. DiMA was aware of this fact now, although he hadn’t been aware of it at time. So, the Patrician wanted DiMA to assist in providing Ankh-Morpork with a better show out of the death of Tektus? DiMA felt sick. 

“I don’t think I can do what you’d like, your lordship. When someone is unable to speak for himself, it isn’t about what other people want, no matter how much your masses want their bread and circuses. It’s about what the person in question would have wanted, and Tektus has no kin to speak for him. I,” DiMA felt rather depressed by this fact, “am the closest person in Ankh-Morpork Tektus has to a friend. He wouldn’t want to be made a puppet, especially not so that he could walk to his death so the masses could feel more satisfied about what happens when one toys with a certain Commander Vimes, your lordship.”

“Hmm. That is a rather naive thing of you to say, Mr. DiMA, when it is known that Tektus must have had co-conspirators. Isn’t that a naive thing to say, Drumknott?” said the Patrician.

His secretary agreed, “Just so, sir.”

“And you don’t like Commander Vimes very much, do you, Mr. DiMA? Which would suggest that you’ve done something egregious.” The Patrician smiled slightly. “The innocent have nothing to fear from the Commander of the Watch.”

“Everyone has something to fear of the Commander of the Watch, your lordship,” DiMA said quietly. “My brother was and _is_ innocent, and Commander Vimes got him a hole in the head for his trouble.” 

"But Tektus is the one who actually shot him, and if this will perhaps put your philosophical objections to rest, Tektus is no longer here. Tektus is dead. Whatever made Tektus, Tektus, has departed for some hereafter. A body remains, and a worm does not seek permission to make a buffet of a corpse," said the Patrician. 

"He would not have wanted to leave a corpse behind. He would have sought Division, your lordship," said DiMA, who was thinking about the Palace Guard's words. 

"Capital!" said the Patrician. "Just what I had in mind." 

What the Patrician meant by Division was not something Tektus would have ever intended. But Tektus was gone, and DiMA had naively admitted that he was Tektus's only friend in Ankh-Morpork and Sam Vimes would have seen DiMA die and someone had to walk to those gallows. DiMA listened to the Patrician explain what he wanted, and he knew he was going to do what the heron-like tyrant was asking, and he felt sick and disgusted with himself, as if the silver and copper of his wires had all tarnished and corroded at once and now electricity sludged through him like the river Ankh. 

Why was it that Nick never corroded? Why was DiMA cast for this role? They had been struck from the same mould. 

In the end, DiMA's feeble protest was, "I shall miss my classes." 

The Patrician looked incredulous, and he turned to his secretary, and he directed, "Mr. Drumknott, write Mr. DiMA an excuse for school. Put it in with the rest of his papers." The Patrician's gaze returned to DiMA. "One last thing for now. Deciphering this message could spell the difference between war and peace. What does it say, Mr. DiMA?" 

"No, your lordship," said DiMA wearily, but he knew that terrifying human had read him and gotten the answer he wanted already. 

"No?" questioned the Patrician. "You can't read it or won't read it?" 

"No, it is not the difference between war and peace. It is a grocery list and, to judge by the quantities involved, it is the palace grocery list, your lordship," admitted DiMA, because the Patrician had read him, and there was no point in pretending he could not read that cipher, a trivial little thing. 

"Very good, Mr. DiMA. Do you know that it is also a No Such Thing?" 

"A No Such Thing, your lordship?" DiMA played along. 

"Yes. An uncrackable cipher. Now, you have a busy week ahead of you, Mr. DiMA. Drumknott, do give this… entity his instructions. A palace guard will show you out," said the Patrician. 

DiMA took a folder, which did indeed contain his school excuse from Drumknott. He headed out, feeling terribly sullied, and as he went, he heard the Patrician remark idly to his secretary, "What an enigma of a machine, that Mr. DiMA is."

* * *

The Patrician was not sure how well synths could hear. His intelligence briefs were vexingly lacking on that topic. As well as a human? As well as a vampire? It was difficult to say, because the two main examples were, to wit, a fairly twitchy constable and an Unseen University shut in. There was also Sybil’s new boy, Shaun, but he seemed to be much like any particularly intelligent 10 year old. Sybil was very proud of him. In any case, the Patrician waited a few moments after he could no longer hear DiMA’s footsteps, and then he commented, “I did point out to you, Drumknott, that the Watch must have cracked that new Thieves’ Guild cipher to close the Aubrey Delagney case and that it was interesting both that there was no mention of them doing so in any of their official reports and also that Constable Valentine happened to be the Watchman on that case and that he can be linked to a number of other closed cases that would have been solved much more easily by reading other people’s clacks messages.”

“You did, sir,” said Drumknott.

The Patrician looked at the encoded grocery list. “And then I speculated - is this code-cracking unique to Constable Valentine, or might this particular talent be shared by other synths? And here I have my answer. How interesting. And this DiMA can print minds on empty brains, and it isn’t magic at all. I know that Sybil has had him over. I must ask her if she’s noticed anything else about him.”

“You have tea scheduled with her on Thursday, sir,” said Drumknott.

“Very good. Really, that particular skill set is wasted at Unseen University,” the Patrician speculated.

“If I may observe, sir, Mr. DiMA seems entirely too guilt-riddled to be useful for… most purposes,” said Drumknott circumspectly.

“True, true,” the Patrician admitted. “Still, I wonder how he does at crossword puzzles.”

Drumknott ahemed and said, “If sir would look at the intelligence dossiers from Genua…”

* * *

The golem Dilibrat was a conundrum. If a wizard were to bewitch someone and make them not themself, Vetinari would prevail on Archchancellor Ridcully, who would likely prevail upon Dr. Hix, and something would be done. If a different magic user were at fault in stealing will and subverting personality, Vetinari would have consulted Mrs. Proust, the most senior witch in Ankh-Morpork, who would have made the villain at hand wish she were Dr. Hix instead. But the magic that made Dilibrat one person when he had one set of words in his head and a different person entirely with a different set of words was a magic so old that it was hardly magic anymore. No, it was religion.

With the words that the long-dead priests had given Dilibrat, he was a sober, law-abiding member of society, who would soon join the ranks of the Freed. With a Children of Atom pamphlet in his head, Dilibrat was a religious terrorist who sought Division and, incidentally, for Ankh-Morpork to be consumed in a nuclear explosion.

With his original words back in his head, Dilibrat was back to his previous self, but he was contrite. Sorrowful. The clay remembered.

Dilibrat’s trial was an informal one - he was, at the moment, property, a tool. One did not put a crossbow on trial. Although, Mr. Slant reminded, they had once put the black blade Kring on trial. 

Informal or not, Adora Belle had nonetheless obtained for Dilibrat a lawyer, one Miss Emily King. She provided a very reasoned argument that one compelled could not be prosecuted for actions taken under compulsion and that charges should instead be laid upon the source of compulsion. It was a decent argument, especially for a young lawyer, structured upon the precedents of the past. Vetinari was prepared to accept it.

Especially insofar as it enabled him to lay even more charges at the feet of Tektus and his Children of Atom cultists. Most of them would die. The skeleton, of course, could not die again. A few he’d allow community service. They might even try to restart the Cult of Atom. It was better to have known cults with known goals than loose cannons running around his city.

So Dilibrat walked out, with Adora Belle and her cloud of smoke and the young lawyer Emily King.

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 1: Moist Von Lipwig_

Moist didn’t like waking up in the morning. It was unseemly. If the day could just start around lunch, that would be swell. Alas, he was fated to be a working man. Crossley, his butler, woke him, after several protests, and informed him that Adora Belle had accosted someone with one of her crossbows and that Crossley suspected it was the hair trigger one. Moist dismissed, “Probably just a Watchman.”

Vetinari sometimes sent them around when he desired a meeting that was unplanned, or at least unplanned by Moist. He dressed, in his own bathroom, leisurely, and then he sauntered out to investigate.

The thing that Adora Bella had at crossbow point was not a Watchman. It looked like something that Dr. Hanth Forvord back in Uberwald might have made on a bad day in between extracting living brains. 

“I can’t have these things giving golems a bad name with their licentiousness. Golems would never perpetuate that sort of depravity,” Adora Bella sniffed.

Yes, golems were assuredly not known for licentiousness. They lacked certain vital parts of anatomy and had, hitherto, also lacked the creativity to compensate for the missing components. Certainly, there were no golems applying to join the Seamstresses' Guild. Maybe there would be now, if they realized there might be a demand.

But now that Adora Belle mentioned depravity, something came to mind. If Moist subtracted off the forest of tubes on the thing’s head, bristling like the horns of a gargoyle, and if he swapped the milky but definitely not blind eyes for something a bit more glowing, and if the damage and the sense of style and poise were different, then this thing would look like the tinker toy that had made it into the paper because the unbribable, incorruptible teetotaller had a taste for tin.

Moist had seen that Nick Valentine, when it had come calling as a Watchman at the Golem Trust, and more recently, he had seen it around Scoone Avenue. Commander Vimes had brought his bit on the side home with him. Moist had a certain relationship with danger, and he took clients to the Pink PussyCat Club, knowing that his wife spied on him, and even he thought that ol’ Stoneface was being very, very cheeky. Moist frankly wouldn’t have thought that Vimes had it in him. Perhaps Valentine was the one that had it in him. It didn’t do to speculate.

“I think this is a different one,” Moist supplied helpfully.

“But it’s up to something, I’m sure,” Adora Belle insisted, fuming. She glared at the thing, with the look that she’d be able to find something to pin on it soon enough, possibly a crossbow bolt.

“Yes. Government business,” the thing said, in a calm, measured, soothing voice, and it held up a piece of paper.

Moist knew the handwriting - Drumknott, and he knew the signature - Vetinari. It could be a forgery, but if it was, the forgery had been made by someone who not only knew what Drumknott and Vetinari’s handwriting looked like but knew that Moist knew what Drumknott and Vetinari’s handwriting looked like.

He smiled winningly. “I’ll have this sorted.”

So he took the piece of paper and took the weird thing down to the palace, and Moist ended up waiting in the Patrician’s waiting room, with its clock with its _ticktockticktocktickticktockticktocktock..._

Moist fidgeted. The Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway was looking into a new train line running out towards Cwtch, although Pant-y-Girdl and Cladh were both competing for the bid, and he was rather hoping that he could play all three cities off each other and end up with lines to all three locations, although if he had to pick, Pant-y-Girdl was the capital, of course, and the River Llwk-Yu had major trade implications. He didn’t need to be dealing with a pointless tagalong right now.

After eight minutes waiting, the odd tinker toy, which was standing because it didn’t fit into any of the chairs, said, “Oh. It repeats. I expected that it would.”

Moist thought for a moment. “The ticking?” It was maddening with its irregularity.

“Yes,” the thing said simply.

It was damned uncanny. Moist knew where he stood with golems, but this thing wasn’t one. 

The door to the Patrician’s office opened, and Moist skirted in, the thing following with some - did Moist detect anxiety? Oh yes, it was nervous around the Patrician.

Then it wasn’t stupid. Shame.

“You don’t have an appointment, and aren’t you supposed to be chasing Cwtch right now, Mr. Lipwig?” asked the Patrician, not turning to look at Moist.

Moist held up the piece of paper, nonetheless, and insisted, “Sir, this thing just showed up this morning, and it says you want it to shadow me.”

“ _He_ is something known as a _synth_ , and that is correct, although you shouldn’t need me to say it,” said Vetinari, finally turning around and casting a nonspecific disappointed look at the both of them, “For a day, or perhaps more, if Mr. DiMA doesn’t learn what I need him to.”

The papers had said that Vimes’s wind-up toy was something called a ‘synth’, that was true, and wrote about it as a ‘he’. Moist didn’t have to like it. “And, ah, what’s it, er, he need to learn, sir?”

“The heuristic engrams of -” DiMA started.

Vetinari waved a hand, silencing the tagalong. “Just be yourself, Mr. Lipwig. Or anyone else your jobs may necessitate you to be. That will be most instructive for Mr. DiMA. Nothing else is required of you.”

“Oh… kay, sir,” Moist said slowly, looking for the angle. All he was getting were curves. “Just one day, sir?”

“Possibly. You are wasting morning, Mr. Lipwig,” said the Patrician and implied, _and my time_.

“Thank you, sir,” Moist lied, and he looked to DiMA. “Look, I’ve just got a meeting with some of the officials from Cwtch, why you don’t you nip down to the Post Office, Stanley can tell you about stamps…”

“I am to observe you, Mr. Lipwig,” DiMA said calmly.

Moist thought about how unexpectedly bringing along something that looked like a mad scientist had sneezed would go over with the notoriously conservative druidic leaders of Llamedos. They’d be looking for a blood sacrifice to atone for that sort of abomination, and didn’t DiMA just seem to be completely bloodless? No, between the two of them, Moist didn’t want to be caught as the only one with a pulse.

He lied again, “Okay, you can come down to New Ankh Station with me.”

Moist lost DiMA on the way there. It wasn’t hard. He met up with the druids from Cwtch in the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway office, who were very concerned about the potential effects of smoke on their trees.

“And hasn’t Scrote had a sharp uptick in logging since the rail has come to town?” the third was asking when the office door opened, and one of the many rail goblins peeked his head in, followed by the abomination.

“Mister Damp!” said the goblin, who knew perfectly well that Moist hated that nickname, “Found this lost heavy machinery, asking where you were. ‘S got a note from your Patrician.”

“We were aware that Ankh-Morpork contains many crimes against nature,” said the second druid, cooly, and the first one muttered, “Like that sausage-inna-bun I just tried…” The second said more loudly, “It is known as a city of moral corruption and wickedness.”

“Yes, those are certainly some of our strengths,” Moist said breezily.

The druids didn’t quite seem to know what to do with that. The first rallied, “But we do have considerable exports of rain, coal, iron, musical instruments, small wooden ornaments, portable henges, precious metals, silver, gold, zinc, arsenic -”

“Oh, our Patrician’s not really a fan of that last one, sorry,” Moist said cheerily. Throw them off balance, make them think they were bringing less to the table than they actually were… His usual tactic of letting potential business partners get themselves drunk didn’t work on Llamedosian druids; they were notoriously straight-laced.

The first druid said carefully, “And we can move mountains.”

Moist carefully didn’t let on his interest at that statement. There were rumours about druids. “We’ve always found that a sufficiently determined crew of trolls and golems, with some Alchemist support -”

The third druid carefully set a small tray of bonsai mountains on the negotiating table, the sort kept by those monks in saffron robes, and the first gestured with his hand, a beckoning motion. The mountain moved. 

Moist bit his lip, and he noticed that his shadow for the day had settled in at the side of the door, and he was watching the business with the bonsai mountains _very_ intently.

Then the second spoke up again, “But we’ve heard about Ankh-Morpork’s iniquity, dipsomania, lasciviousness, and heresy, and we’ve also heard about the Effing Great Tit, whose nesting sites are endangered by the greatly increased levels of tree felling caused by the advent of the railway, and we will not have these threats imported to Cwtch along with the railway.”

“No, no, there’ll be no threats to tits in Cwtch,” Moist assured.

And the negotiations went back and forth for a few hours until they reached a deal that the druids thought was amicable to them and that Moist _knew_ was amicable, at least to him. Then he talked to some bards from Cladh and did the same thing. By the time the officials from Pant-y-Girdl came around, Moist even knew _which_ questions to ask about the whole moving mountains business.

Then he was off to the post office. If DiMA had been someone to chat up, as opposed to a something, Moist might have asked it - _him,_ if he sent many letters, if he had a favourite stamp, what he thought of the new stamps inset with genuine artificial Ankhstones, which were proving very popular in a certain female demographic…

Moist did stop and talk to people along the way, so that they’d remember that Mr. Railway had talked to them, and then shortly thereafter, he became Mr. Post Office, and he talked to Groat and Stanley. Neither of them asked about Moist’s shadow, somewhat to his relief, somewhat to his irritation. No, Moist didn’t want to explain the plus one that the Patrician had saddled him with for the day, but he was ever so slightly offended that the baseline level of weirdness expected of him had such a high bar set.

At the Royal Bank, however, Mr. Bent did comment on DiMA, dryly asking if it - Moist didn’t correct Bent - had wandered up from Hubert’s laboratory.

“No. I’ll be seeing Mr. Hubert Turvy tomorrow,” DiMA said in that calm, measured voice, flipping through a folder of papers.

“I don’t suppose you have an account?” Bent asked, rather dubiously.

That was almost always the first thing Moist asked of people, making small talk, but he asked it of _people_ , and so the thought hadn’t occurred to him, given the circumstances.

“No. It wouldn’t be worth the effort, given my income and the interest fees and the minimum balance fees,” DiMA replied.

Bent frowned slightly. He’d been opposed to small people with small money in his bank, but Moist had opened up the Royal Bank to them, and so Bent must now have felt some consternation to be told that there was some pocket change that wouldn’t be entering his vaults because there wasn’t enough of it to rub together. Bent said stiffly, “We _must_ have an account option to suit. Sit down with me.”

Moist gleefully let Bent drag DiMA off to an office and sauntered off to see how Mrs. Bent, _née_ Drapes was doing. Despite marrying, she’d kept her career, and good for her. She was a damned good clerk. Besides, she and Mr. Bent hadn’t gotten up to any multiplication yet…

Moist did all the necessary greasing of the rails and was about to slip away to the Mint, when Bent returned DiMA to Moist. Bent looked somewhat embarrassed to admit, “We don’t have an account to suit. He’s… broke.”

“I did do my homework,” DiMA murmured.

“Oh, come on, even if all he has to deposit is a dollar -” Moist started.

Bent looked guilty, and DiMA steepled his fingers and explained, “It isn’t that. Although I don’t, at the moment. It’s a matter of interest rates -”

“Right, and this doesn’t rate my interest,” Moist dismissed.

He attempted to pawn DiMA off on Mr. Shady the eighteenth, the Hereditary Foreman of the Ankh-Morpork Mint, but DiMA would not be pawned, possibly being of too little value for any self-respecting fence to accept, and asked, “The imps that you use for the higher note bills as an anti-forgery tactic. Could I examine one?”

“They’re only a sort of intelligent spell,” Moist dismissed.

“Yes. Conventional imps don’t manifest very long before they dissipate back to Hell. What do you do if the imp in a bill runs out before the bill is retired from circulation?” DiMA asked.

Ponder Stibbons had asked Moist similar questions, when he’d gone to Unseen University to discuss the matter with him, thinking that imps in money were a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever Moist saw one.

Moist didn’t quite want to answer this question, but Mr. Shady, unfortunately, did, “Why, it invalidates the bill.”

“Are the expected end users of hundred note bills aware of this design flaw?” asked DiMA, in the least-judgemental voice Moist had ever heard.

“Feature,” Moist corrected, “It’s a design feature, not a flaw. You know, anyone who might be using the hundred note bills has… room, if one is invalidated.” His face twisted with displeasure, though. He and Adora were ‘expected end users’ of hundred note bills.

“And, of course, imps also dissipate if taken into antimagic fields,” DiMA said thoughtfully.

“I can’t see anyone taking a c-note into an antimagic field,” Moist started, although he could. Antimagic fields were used for the highest levels of football games, and star footballers often carried around a decent chunk of change.

“And they can react erratically to high magic fields. Anything odd ever happen to them near the Unreal Estate?” asked DiMA.

“No. Absolutely not,” lied Moist, who remembered quite well what had happened last week when Lady Selachii’s sedan chair had gone by Thaumaturgical Park and her pocketbook had exploded with white doves. She hadn’t put the incident together, thinking of it as one of the common perils of living in Ankh-Morpork, but Moist knew better. He was going to have to do something about it all before it happened to someone such as, oh, Harry King. Just another of Moist’s teensy little fires to put out.

Now suddenly Moist was wondering if Vetinari had gotten _creative_ with his clerks. The Patrician had a demented sense of humour at times. Moist had never known a Dark Clerk to be anything other than human, which was the scary thing about them, but...

“I see,” said DiMA, and his posture said, _I see that you’re lying, but I’m too polite to call you on it._

Suddenly, Moist asked, “What are you, anyway?”

DiMA shrugged. “I’m a Generation 2 synth.”

“I mean…” Moist clarified, “What do you do?”

“I am a grader at the Unseen University,” DiMA said.

Moist was quite sure that was true and also not the answer he was looking for. Something about DiMA was prickling the back of his neck. He recognized something, here. “Before that? You’re new in Ankh-Morpork.”

DiMA appeared to weigh several answers, and he tendered, “I was the leader of a small community on an island.”

_Bingo_. A politician. Which was a nice word for a… con-man. Now DiMA was a grader at Unseen University. Not a wizard, but a hanger-on, and what was that called? A charlatan.

Suddenly, Moist felt a flood of relief as he realized that the Patrician’s game today wasn’t about him. It was about DiMA. What did the Patrician have the sod in for, Moist wondered?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Art for this chapter was provided by[allislaughter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allislaughter) ([glitchvault74](https://glitchvault74.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr) using their palette style, and is very much appreciated!**
> 
> S: One of the things I like about the conversation between Sybil and Vetinari in this chapter is that to me, it's an example of how Sybil can be kindly, sweetly, subtly ruthless. She's grown fond of Nick. She doesn't wish him ill. That said, him being made a Marquess will not be easy for him, but it will, in the long run, smooth out potential problems that Shaun might eventually have had to face if that precedent hadn't been set. It's maybe a little underhanded to leverage Vimes's and Valentine's relationship in this way, but on the up side, if someone had just come out and told Valentine, "Hey, I think sticking you with this obnoxious title and putting you through the associated bs might make life a little easier for Shaun," he'd probably be down with it, anyway.
> 
> S: "Xian just would not shut up about Emperor Han McSweeney and Attendant Hong. They were one of Xian’s O.T.P.s. He’d made DiMA edit a whole zine of them." You just know Xian had to supply all the material for that zine himself. He's a dedicated shipper. Sort of like the rarepair shippers who have to generate ALL the material on AO3 for their particular rairpair... like. Uhm. A and I...
> 
> A: At one point, Pratchett was going to write a book about taxes. It probably would have been Moist-centric. It probably would have been called Raising Taxes. Instead, he wrote Raising Steam, which was about railways. Now, at this point, Moist is the Postmaster General, the Master of the Royal Mint, runs the Royal Bank (and is also Harry King's personal financier, a conflict of interests), is Mr. Railway, and is married to Adora Belle, who is the CEO of the Grand Trunk Clacks Company in addition to being a Trustee of the Golem trust. Making Moist the Taxmaster would give him both more power and more conflicts of interest. I'd like to think Vetinari is smart enough not to do that. Hence a minor subplot in this fic is Vetinari exploring alternative Taxmaster options. Very alternative.
> 
> A: It's of note that, in Making Money, Moist is a party to forcibly re-gendering a golem, and that when she expresses a romantic interest in him, he asks if they could just change the words in her head to make her not do that. This is _yikes_. Moist gets something of a redemption arc, throughout the series, but he never gets all of the way to treating golems 100% like people. So I can't imagine he'd be respectful to synths.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	15. Invited * Two Dads * DiMA & Taxes - Day 2: Hubert Turvy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Only Happy When It Rains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esEdC0c3YI4&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=26&t=0s) by Garbage.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Invited * Two Dads * DiMA & Taxes - Day 2: Hubert Turvy_

Valentine found himself rather curious about some of the messages that he saw on the clacks while looking out the window. He and Thighbiter finished their patrol without too many more incidents, just a few more thefts that they took down reports on and one assault, where they had to pull a drunk man away from taking a chair to his wife. They returned to the Yard and sat down and finished the reports in the canteen, as Watchmen often did. Thighbiter looked over Valentine’s writing and commented, “You’ve got neat handwriting.”

Valentine got that a lot, and he just said, “Thanks.”

Of the other Watchmen in the canteen, Visit outright called him a harlot. Valentine had to hand it to Visit for at least saying it to his face, instead of just muttering things like half the rest of the Watch seemed to be inclined to do. He smiled pleasantly at Visit and asked, “Do you still have Book study on Tuesday and Thursdays?”

“Yes?” Visit said warily. Almost no one was interested in when he had Book study with his fellow Omnian believers, even though he’d put the information up on all the Watch bulletin boards.

“Hm. I think I’m off Thursday swing, which means I can make it. I’ll bring coffee and chocolate biscuits, and we can go through the Book line by line and you can tell me where anything in there says anything I’ve done qualifies me for Guild membership with the Seamstresses,” said Valentine, who’d read a few different translations of the Book of Om, because the library had them. It mostly made him feel homesick.

Visit looked flummoxed. He clearly wasn’t used to random abominations threatening to come to his Book study with coffee and chocolate biscuits. “We will not be swayed by the gifts of incubi.”

“Your own Book. Line by line,” repeated Valentine.

“But the good chocolate biscuits or the Morporkian ones?” asked Visit, suspiciously.

“The Borogravian ones. I may be heartless, and I may even be a monster, but please, don’t think so lowly of me,” said Valentine.

“I shall see you there,” Visit said stiffly.

Next, there was a vicious old rooster in his locker, and Valentine could tell it wasn’t Fittly this time. No, he was thinking Madison Drogace, with her forearms all scratched up by a rooster’s spurs, as she changed into her uniform and pulled down the sleeves. Angua scowled at Valentine being pranked again, perhaps if only because it might make more work for her, and then said, looking a bit furtive, “...I’ll give you market price for that chicken.”

Wearily, Valentine said, “Captain, you can just have it,” and he gave her the bird. He thought about also giving Drogace the bird, in a different sense, but he decided that he’d rather ask Captain Carrot, who was doing up the new month’s schedule, about a bit of time off. Carrot rather politely denied him.

Valentine sighed and headed out for the Vimes residence. He’d been invited, and Lord knew, he was mistaken for being undead often enough. Vampires had to be invited in. Synths, apparently, didn’t strictly need to be invited, but did feel guilty about all of it.

* * *

Sybil seemed to be more pleased to see Valentine show up than Vimes did. She greeted him with a warm if smothering hug. Vimes just stood there, looking awkward. Shaun peered at Valentine with open suspicion, and he said petulantly, “You said you were going to Fourecks and never coming back. You said that if you stayed, it would be hard for my father to get his job done, so you had to go.”

Young Sam looked confused. Willikins turned a frosty expression on Valentine but said nothing. Codsworth floated about in the background.

Valentine admitted, “I probably am going to make it harder for your father to get his job done? Not intentionally or anything, people are just… reacting badly to me, these days. But he asked me to stay, anyway.”

“So you’re staying?” asked Shaun in a voice that did not dare to hope, because he’d been burned a few too many times.

“Yes, and he’ll be staying here, because… er,” said Vimes.

Sybil prompted gently, “You’re going to have to explain to the boys, Sam.”

Vimes did not appear to have thought that part through. The news that Valentine was not going away to Fourecks and was staying, in particular staying right here, seemed to be good enough for Shaun, who promptly limpeted to Valentine’s side.

“Erm,” said Vimes. “So… some people have more than one… spouse.”

“Oh yeah, goblins do that,” said young Sam, brightly.

“Right,” said Vimes. “Right… so I asked Mr. Valentine to be my… husband.”

“So I get my dad back?” asked Shaun, still limpeted to Valentine’s side, still not quite hopeful.

Willikins didn’t really move or anything, but Valentine had the distinct sense that if Shaun, who looked very much a full-blooded son of Vimes and Sybil, was not plastered to his side, that something inexplicably unpleasant would have happened to him.

“If you’d like me to be, kiddo,” said Valentine, and he ruffled Shaun’s hair.

“But why does Shaun get two dads?” demanded young Sam. Valentine had been more than content to assume the weird uncle role with young Sam, but if Shaun was going to have two dads, young Sam was not one to be out-dadded, and he'd apparently decided that he was entitled to just as many dads as his brother who was both older and younger in ways that did and did not matter.

“Oh, uh, I just used to help your father look after Shaun, back when we were in the Commonwealth,” said Valentine.

“But you’ve helped me with my homework, and you tackled that mean man at the park,” said young Sam, apparently intending to establish some dad-claiming credentials.

“But he helped me get out of the Institute, and he’s helped me with my homework, too,” insisted Shaun, “and we used to live in a detective agency together, him and me and my father.”

“We should go for dinner,” suggested Sybil, “and then we can sort out your schedule and have a room set up for you.”

They went for dinner. There wasn’t a cup of sherry set out for Nick. There wasn’t anything. The table, at default, had enough chairs to seat a platoon, but today, there were only four chairs, and Codsworth had to go hunt down a fifth chair. Sybil looked faintly perplexed, as if she had not expected a sudden shortage of chairs. The thing that Codsworth returned with was… a chair, and it did not remotely match any of the other chairs at the table, because it was an ancient armchair, possibly blue but definitely covered in a thick, protective shell of dust.

“I don’t actually remember ever seeing that chair,” said Sybil, rubbing her chin.

Valentine sat down on it gingerly and was promptly covered in a cloud of dust. The humans and the one Generation 3 synth in Ankh-Morpork had their dinner. Valentine watched. Valentine watched Vimes cut his food into tiny little pieces and push it around his plate without eating it, which was a particularly odd thing for Vimes to do. Valentine called him on it, “Nerves?”

Vimes held up a microscopic piece of kale and inspected it dourly. “Whyever would you say that?”

“Because you’ve dissected your plate more finely than an Igor could, and I’ve seen you eat your own cooking, so I know you’re not picky,” observed Valentine.

“Sam cooks?” Sybil asked, with apparent interest.

Vimes conceded defeat and transferred some of the mess he’d made of his plate onto a spoon and swallowed it. “Not well.”

“What were some of the things you’d cook?” said Sybil who appeared to be fascinated by this topic, as one was fascinated by a trainwreck.

Vimes blinked. “Deathclaw? Big lizard-thing, about the size of three men, claws the length of your forearm. Fairly intelligent.”

Sybil sighed wistfully. “Oh. I should have liked to have a few of those.”

“They taste sort of like pork, but I couldn’t figure out how to get bacon off them,” said Vimes sadly.

Vimes listened to his boys read, although afterwards, Valentine found himself again roped into helping young Sam and Shaun with their homework. He was, the boys had found, a very effective spell-checker. He was also good at telling them when they had the wrong answer at maths, but he had trouble explaining to them how they ought to do sums. The way Valentine’s mind did sums wasn’t human.

Willikins lurked at the edges of perception. Valentine was acutely aware of him being there, though. He was afraid of what would happen if he lost track of where Willikins was and ended up alone in a room.

After Vimes put the boys off in their room to sleep or, more likely, to pretend to sleep and stay up getting into quiet sorts of trouble, Sybil sat the three of them down around a table to work out their schedules, which bemused Valentine. Vimes simply seemed resigned to the fact that this was happening.

Sybil said briskly, “So you need to understand that Sam’s not home every night, although he’s home most nights, and he’s good about being home at 6 for the boys, but sometimes, he’ll leave after that for work again, even at odd hours of the night. Still, I think the fairest thing to do is just going to be to divide up the month as evenly as possible.”

“But he’s your husband, though,” said Valentine weakly. He felt like a thief.

“It takes at least 100 days to properly set up a wedding, but he’ll be your husband, as well, and we may as well get used to things,” said Sybil.

Valentine looked over at Vimes, who looked like he wanted to stay out of this as much as possible.

“Besides,” said Sybil brightly, “I’ve been wanting to catch _Bloodaxe and Ironhammer_ for months now at the Opera House, and it’s almost done its run, and Sam doesn’t really want to go.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that one’s great,” said Valentine. “I’d’ve gone if I could afford the ticket.”

“Really?” inquired Sybil. “Are you free on Saturday?”

“No, Captain Carrot’s got me on Day and Night, Saturday,” said Valentine.

“Hm, Sunday?” said Sybil, looking over her calendar.

“I’m just on Day on Sunday, so I’ve got Swing and Night off,” said Valentine.

“That works. Let me pencil you down, then,” said Sybil, beaming. “You know, I sang the part of Bloodaxe, back in school.”

Vimes watched in quiet bewilderment as his wife set herself up on a date with his fiance. 

* * *

After they’d all sorted their schedules and Vimes had wandered off to work on one of the house's traps, Valentine flagged Sybil down to ask her how she felt about premarital… relations.

“Well, of course, whether or not you two choose to do anything is your decision, yours and Sam’s,” Sybil replied, even if she was starting to grow absolutely exhausted with what she viewed as ‘the boys’ pining’. “But yes, I’ve given my blessing.”

“But… why? Why would you be okay with that?” asked Valentine, looking both relieved and confused.

It was just sex. Sybil didn’t see why people got so worked up about it. “You mean beyond the fact that when you’re around, you do everything you can to keep him alive? Or that you tirelessly work to help those around you? Or that you’re absolutely wonderful with the boys? Or-”

Nick interrupted, clearly embarrassed, “I’m not-”

“Mister Valentine,” Sybil said sternly, “of your long list of positive qualities, your absolute inability to just _accept a compliment_ is not one.”

That quieted him down.

“But in the end, the most important thing is that I don’t believe for a moment that this is a zero sum game. If you gain him, it does not mean I lose him, not for a moment. Sam’s heart simply isn’t that small.”

* * *

Vimes walked to the Yard with Valentine, which was an odd sensation. Vimes had work, Valentine had work, they both had work at the same place… why shouldn’t they walk along together? It was just odd. Vimes had not had much to do with Valentine since he’d returned to Ankh-Morpork, and now that he was walking alongside him again, he remembered how much he’d missed it: Valentine's easy walking pace, how his expert attention deftly tracked objects of interest around him… and what was at least somewhat new was seeing how Valentine had taken to Ankh-Morpork. He’d pause and greet people, and they’d greet him back.

But one looked him cold in the eyes and called him a floozy and spat, and then Valentine hurriedly pushed Vimes through the crowd on the street before anything could happen. Vimes was furious, and he turned around to at least say something, but the person was gone. Vimes demanded, “Who was that?”

“Someone I’ll be crossing off my Hogswatch cards list,” replied Valentine, grimacing.

Vimes remembered the recent tour of the city that he’d tried to give Valentine. People being offended by Valentine existing were entirely too common an occurrence.

They arrived at the Yard not long after. There was a general atmosphere of not-thrilled-ness, which Vimes had steeled himself for. He found it was, however, more aimed at Valentine than him, which confused Vimes even as it angered him. He was the one who’d proposed; it just stood to reason that any blame ought to be laid on him.

Valentine paced over to check what Captain Carrot had done with the schedule, like a skiff among icebergs, so chilly was the mood. At the sight of Vimes, whatever a number of Watchmen had wanted to say to Valentine died on their lips, but he could tell from their eyes, which wouldn’t meet his, that it hadn’t been pleasant. He wanted to grab someone and scream and that was, he was entirely certain, the wrong thing. If it was someone giving Sally some trouble about her girlfriends, Vimes would have been able to get away with chewing out the offender, but people would take it the wrong way with Valentine being his fiance. Vimes knew that Valentine would almost compulsively fill in extra shifts whenever Captain Carrot asked Valentine, and Vimes wondered, lips curling with disgust, of those eyes that wouldn’t meet his - how many of them, had Valentine covered for, when it was granny’s third funeral?

Vimes turned, and he cornered old Fred Colon, who had never been quick enough, and he prompted, almost pleasantly, “Did you have something to say, Sergeant?”

“No, sir,” said Colon, who appeared to be sweating.

“Really? Cat not got your tongue?” Vimes continued.

“Definitely not, sir,” said Colon.

“You don’t have to ‘sir’ me, Fred. You know we’re friends here, Fred,” said Vimes airily.

“Well, uhm, sir,” gulped Colon, “you know it’s a bit… irregular, and we’re all just a bit… worried about you. Sir.”

“Worried about me,” Vimes repeated stonily.

“Y’know, you taking a bit of the primrose path. It’s not your normal good judgement, sir. You taking up with that…” Colon was sweating buckets, enough buckets to bankrupt the Ankh-Morpork bucket industry.

“Him,” Vimes corrected. Valentine was not a ‘that’.

“Er. Him. Well, he’s clearly led you astray -” started Colon.

Vimes cut him off with a stern, “Ah. You’re misunderstanding, Fred. I broke into a heavily-guarded underground complex and rescued him from certain death and he called me his knight in shining armour.” He paused for effect. “I have to do the responsible thing and make an honest man of him, Fred.”

Colon blinked a few times as that information filtered in. “Oh. I… see. Yeah, I reckon you’d have to, in those circumstances.” He scratched his head. “Pract’cly obligated, really.”

“Yes. Good. I’m glad you see,” said Vimes. Colon was more of a gossip than an old fish-wife, so that story would spread quickly and, Vimes thought gloomily, making an honest entity out of a rescuee was at least a story most could swallow. He did regret making Valentine sound like a princess, though, when he was clearly a queen. A drama queen.

Colon’s overtaxed brain laboured gallantly, “And… he did rescue you from that looney Tektus, din’t he?”

“Ye-es. Yes, he certainly did. So he’ll have to make an honest man of me,” agreed Vimes. _And good luck with that, poor sod._

Colon nodded. He said vaguely, “Stands to reason. Perfectly rational.”

Vimes walked over to where Valentine was examining the schedule and saw written in Carrot’s hand, which was still more suited to runic scripts than Ankh-Morporkian: 

> Accounts: Pessimal  
>  Forensics: Littlebottom  
>  Infirmary: Igor  
>  Night Patrol Dolly Sisters: Angua/Nobby  
>  …  
>  And so it continued, almost interminably, as there were almost 300 Watchmen now, until…  
>  ...  
>  Night Patrol Yard: Vimes/Valentine

Vimes calmly and deliberately asked Valentine to wait in the hallway, where he was quite certain Valentine would listen at the door, and then he stalked into the office where Carrot was, even now, methodically working through the piles of paperwork that accrued whenever Vimes was at his desk, and he shut the door behind him. Then he demanded, “What in the nine hells, Carrot? _I patrol alone._ ”

“Yes. And you were kidnapped while patrolling alone, sir,” said Carrot, “so I’m assigning someone to patrol with you. We have the staffing. We won’t be short anywhere.”

Vimes angrily threw himself into the chair across from Carrot and said hotly, “I can handle myself! We have Tektus, and I’ll pay more close attention to golems as threats now.” 

Carrot gave him a mild, level look.

“Yes, that bloody elf got away, but I carry cold steel as a matter of fact,” Vimes huffed.

“Angua’s assigned in Dolly Sisters with Nobby, and Detritus has taken Bluejohn on a stakeout of a Scrape lab, but I can patrol with you, if you’d prefer,” said Carrot, “and have Valentine do the Watch paperwork here at the Yard, sir,” which was what Carrot would be doing this night.

“Valentine can’t do the paperwork!” Vimes sputtered. That paperwork was supposed to be done by a Captain or the Commander, which mainly meant that Vimes moved it around into different places on the desk until Carrot came around and did it. Angua and Sally mostly avoided it like Vimes did.

“I rather suspect he could, sir. He can read and write, for starters,” said Carrot.

That was not at all what Vimes had meant, and he rather suspected that Carrot knew. “I don’t need a patrol partner. I’ll watch myself. I always have.”

Carrot explained, “I had already decided that I was going to put someone on patrol with you, and I had already decided on Valentine, because he’s flexible about taking extra shifts, and I suspect he may be able to almost keep up with you. Earlier today, before I released the schedule, Valentine came to me and asked if he could have off the shifts where you are on patrol. I asked him why, and he obliged me with an honest answer, which was that he wanted to tail you while you were out alone, because he worries about you. I told him that his request was denied and asked him if he could cover a few extra shifts and told him to come in to check the schedule tonight.”

Vimes craned his neck over the desk and looked at the schedule for the month: Valentine was mostly on days with Flavours, and then he was assigned to the two random Night Patrols a week that Vimes did in addition to his mostly administrative work, and then he was assigned to various random Swing and Night shifts. Valentine had some days where he did only one shift, but many days, he’d work two shifts, and he saw that Carrot had Valentine down for even a few triples. Valentine was certainly willing to put in the work. Carrot could have given Valentine those requested shifts off and not asked why.

Vimes sighed, and he threw open the door, narrowly missing Valentine, who was leaning against the hallway wall, apparently bored. He didn’t look like he’d been listening at the door, which meant that he absolutely had been. Vimes could appreciate that, but nonetheless, he squinted at him and snapped, “Straighten up!”

“Why? I’m not on duty. You patrol alone,” said Valentine, who didn’t move out of his slouch. “You said so.”

Vimes growled disgruntledly, “The schedule says Vimes/Valentine, so hop to.”

Valentine pushed away from the wall and had to fairly run as Vimes took off in what was not his normal proceeding pace but more of an angry storm with high winds. Vimes didn’t need a babysitter! He didn’t need Valentine following him around, being worried. 

Eventually, Vimes settled down some. Valentine wasn’t slowing him down, and it being night and Valentine being more difficult to see clearly for most people who were not Vimes, he wasn’t drawing undue attention. Vimes wasn’t sure what _he_ was supposed to do when Valentine did attract unwanted attention of the recent kind that he’d been getting lately. His instincts tended to involve a blackjack, and Valentine didn’t seem to like that.

It seemed profoundly unfair that Valentine seemed to be attracting the lion’s share of the blame. Oh, Vimes was getting a deluge of angry letters from the League of Decency and the Temple of Blind Io and the Temple of Offler and their ilk, yes, but for every one who seemed to think that Vimes had done something wrong, there were two who thought that Valentine was some sort of horrible slattern who had led Vimes astray, and it made him so bloody furious. Valentine was honest and brave and self-sacrificing and profoundly _decent_. He was a good man, even if he wasn’t a man. He was a good copper.

But that night, they hadn’t run into anyone who recognized Valentine as Valentine, just a few confused people who thought he was a zombie or a golem and a few who didn’t seem to be able to see him at all. Vimes asked Valentine about that, and he shrugged and admitted, “I think their brains just block me out. People are good at only seeing what they want to.”

Mostly, they didn’t find much on patrol, though it wasn’t for lack of trying: a little unlicensed theft, a bit of assault, one lost child who turned out to be a founding being cared for by the Guild of Accountants. They returned him there, and Valentine chided them over not summing up the foundlings properly at night - couldn’t they at least balance the books, fer Christ’s sake?

Then they did run into someone who recognised Valentine as Valentine, a Seamstress, on her corner, under her lamp, who smiled brightly and greeted, “Oh, Constable Valentine! Thank you ever so much for helping me find my lost Virtue.”

“No trouble at all. And how’s that old pussy doing?” said Valentine.

Vimes stared.

“She’s as hairy as ever, now,” said the Seamstress.

Valentine made a noise like a cough. “Virtue’s a cat. Just so you know. Nearly suffocated in the Ankh. Had to be shaved to get the muck off.”

“Oh,” said Vimes.

The Seamstress looked amused. She offered, “Y’know, if that new fiance of yours ever treats you wrong, and you miss a woman’s touch, my rates are very reasonable.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Valentine said.

The Seamstress looked over at Vimes and asked, “Who’s the glum bugger you’re patrolling with, Constable? What happened to the cute little rat?”

“This is Commander Vimes, Pearlie. Constable Flavours is on Days this month. I’m just filling in on a Night shift,” supplied Valentine.

“Commander Vimes!” said Pearlie, whose teeth were anything but. “You’re looking a bit bedraggled, your Grace.”

Vimes squinted in the distance and then shouted, “Oh look, a murder!” and he took off running.

Eventually, Valentine caught up with him, took a look at the body, and grumbled, “This isn’t a murder, sir.” He looked around the area and shook his head sadly. “This is a Suicide.”

Vimes was, also sadly, inclined to agree with that assessment, but it had been a bloody good excuse to escape that conversation. Valentine knew a Seamstress? There had also been that rumor Nobby was passing around about Valentine and some wizard. Vimes wondered if he’d…

Well. He’d more or less dumped Valentine as soon as they’d arrived in Ankh-Morpork. Vimes couldn’t really blame Valentine if he’d had a cuddle up with someone else. He just sort of hoped that he hadn’t. That wasn’t a discussion to have while on patrol, though.

The rain came down on them, and Vimes ducked into an alcove to get out of the wind. Valentine ducked right for the same alcove, and he flattened up against the other side of it, just inches away from Vimes. It was a light rain, not the heavy thunderstorms that had become more common since the Igors had moved in, but still bitterly cold, almost a freezing rain. Vimes tucked his helmet down and hunched his cloak up just so, and pulled a cigar from behind his ear, fumbling to light it.

Valentine grabbed it away and reminded, “No smoking on duty, sir.”

Vimes stared at him incredulously. He sank back against his side of the alcove. After a time, he wondered if Angua ever wanted to kiss Carrot when they were both on duty. Carrot wouldn’t, Vimes was sure. Carrot was like that. But Angua was a bit more human than Carrot for all that she was a werewolf.

He wanted to kiss Valentine, at any rate, but he reminded himself that it wouldn’t be Professional. 

Vimes noted that Valentine wasn’t looking at him at all; he was watching something off in the distance and up, which made the tilt of his helmet a bit unfavourable; rain was running down his face and dripping off his chin. Wondering what made that bit of discomfort worthwhile, he followed Valentine’s gaze with his own eyes up to a clacks tower. Vimes didn’t see any of the Watch codes running. Looked like a bit of chatter, he thought, a few Guild codes he half-recognized. 

Eventually, Valentine’s stance shifted slightly, and he pushed away from his half of the alcove, which brought him a fraction closer to Vimes. He said, “Done It Duncan’s pinched the meeting minutes of the Guild of Archaeologists, Antiquarians, and Tomb Evacuators. We’d better go find him before they or the Thieves’ Guild does. He’s down by Hors Rampant, sir.”

Valentine then took off at a run, and Vimes took after him and shouted, “How do you know that?”

“Mainly because the Thieves’ Guild chatter says they’re gonna hang him up by his figgin39, sir,” replied Valentine.

Vimes frowned and changed his inflection, “How do you know _that_?”

“I’m fluent in ‘clacks’,” Valentine admitted, with obvious reluctance.

“But the Thieves Guild has good ciphers!” said Vimes, suddenly thinking as he ran. Valentine hadn’t even worked out anything on paper.

“‘Good’? Erm. Sure, if you say so, sir,” Valentine said circumspectly, but what he muttered, and what Vimes almost couldn’t hear was, “More like amateur hour.”

Vimes squinted at Valentine as they ran. Amateur hour? Valentine used to say something like that when he was hacking terminals. Something hit Vimes.

So he flicked the pigeon droppings off his sleeve, and then he said, “You used to hack terminals all the time. Decrypting clacks messages is… similar?”

“If by ‘similar’, you mean ‘significantly easier’, sure,” Valentine mumbled.

“Can you do Assassins’ Guild messages?” Vimes asked, fascinated.

“Yes?” Valentine admitted hesitantly. “They’re not hard. Honestly, no one’s using decent encryption. No one’s even got the algorithms to generate anything like secure encryption40 yet. Which, I have to tell you, isn’t.”

“So the communications from the Dwarf Embassy back to -” Vimes started.

“Yes, although I gotta sit down with a Low Dwarfish-Morporkian dictionary for those, because my Dwarfish isn’t so hot yet. I was practicing, and I told Metalmaul he was three small yellow elephants last week,” Valentine admitted. “Could have been worse, though, because if I’d gravelled41 my ‘ _r_ ’ _s_ wrong, there, I would have been calling him a deep fried lard-on-a-stick.” 

Vimes thought his eyes must have looked like saucers as he considered the implications that he had, in the City Watch, an entity who could, apparently, decrypt just about anything the clacks had to offer. “Valentine, why haven’t you told anyone? Think about what Pessimal could do with all that information!”

Valentine grimaced. “Because I _have_ thought about it, and the Watch doesn’t have the staffing to follow all the leads it would turn up, and anyway, it would only intensify the current arms war going on with cipher techniques, and - and this is the important bit, sir - if you try to sit me down in an office to decrypt clacks messages all day, _I_ will go spare.” He levelled a dead serious look at Vimes.

Vimes shuddered. “No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t pull you off the streets. I’m not that kind of monster.” 

And there was Duncan, and not far behind him was a Thieves’ Guild enforcer. Vimes grabbed Duncan by the collar and dragged him down a small side alley. He took a few turns and switchbacks, and then, with the Thieves’ Guild enforcer thrown off, it was time to book Duncan a nice, pleasant stay in one of the cells where he would be safe from angry Tomb Raiders and other less-posh sorts of thieves.

Duncan protested, “But I done it!” He tried to look crafty, and he ended up just looking like a craft project made by one of young Sam’s less skilled classmates. “I’ve stolen Time herself! Y’see, I stole the minutes.”

Valentine groaned and half-covered his face with his hand.

“Truly, the thief of time comes for us all,” Vimes said wearily.

With Duncan safe in protective custody, they returned to their patrol. Eventually, the rain let up. Vimes missed it, when it was gone. Then morning was coming, in its lazy way, and they headed back to the Yard again. Vimes would have sat down to finish his reports, but Valentine offered, “I can finish up the reports, sir?”

Vimes bit his lip. If he patrolled with Valentine, he could get his reports written for him? Gods, what had he done to deserve that? Valentine did have particularly nice handwriting, and his spelling and grammar were very good, even if he did like to drop ‘u’s out of words. “...yes.. I’ll just. Watch.” He fetched himself a cup of coffee with his usual cream and sugar and did just that, watching Valentine write over his shoulder.

It didn’t take Valentine long. “I’m on Day today with Flavours, but I’m off for Swing, so I’ll be back for dinner?”

Vimes nodded at that. He had assorted meetings that would be interspersed with naps, mostly meetings that would be more productive if they were naps, but he’d also be back for dinner.

39 _A small short-crust pasty containing raisins._

40 _A known oxymoron, like military intelligence._

41 _Like rolling, but with more particulate._

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 2: Hubert Turvy_

Hubert Turvy didn’t mind that the Patrician had sent him someone who could affect a polite interest in economics; usually only visiting Agatean economists could manage that. He could even tolerate the unnerving focus that DiMA displayed when Hubert discussed simulation theory. The main problem with his shadow for the day, Hubert Turvy thought, was that DiMA was very distracting to Igor.

DiMA had nice glasswork on his head and back, Hubert thought. The way disconnected pieces of glass seemed to float inside other glass tubes and crackled with lightning was a nice touch. He’d have to ask DiMA who his glassblower was, before the day was over. 

Hubert was lightly hinting at the perils of making a simulation too accurate, when DiMA said softly, “Oh yes. Then the simulation becomes an effigy, like a pin doll.”

“Uhm. I was just going to say that then you run the risk of drawing erroneous conclusions, if you start believing only the simulation, without looking back at reality,” said Hubert, feeling a certain prickle down the back of his neck. “What did you say you do, again?”

“I didn’t,” DiMA said mildly, “I am a grader at Unseen University.”

“Really? No doctorates? Never ran a laboratory?” asked Igor, who seemed disappointed.

“No. Mr. Stibbons frowns on running in the laboratory,” DiMA said wryly. 

“Oh,” said Igor, deflated, “You theemed ath if you might have.”

Then DiMA said brightly, “But you must understand, such endeavours as laboratories require a disposable income.”

Hubert did have a disposable income. He was the nephew of the late Topsy Lavish. He never thought about it, but that was why he was able to muck about with glass tubes and speculate about the effect of the phase of the moon on buying patterns, instead of being, as they called it, gainfully employed.

DiMA tilted his head to one side. “So I must ask. You conjectured that using the Umnian golems as labour force for the city of Ankh-Morpork would lead to unemployment and thus bankruptcy and civil unrest. Have you ever entertained a conjecture about the consequences of using the Umnian golems as a labour force and using the profit generated by their labour and exports to provide a minimum income for the citizenry at large, thereby freeing much of the citizenry from the necessity of work for survival?”

“Oh, no,” Hubert dismissed, “that would never work. People’d just laze about, if they didn’t have to work to survive.”

DiMA stared at Hubert’s laboratory around him. “Really.”

* * *

Artificial Flavours sat on Nick Valentine’s desk and chewed absently on a newspaper page he had pulled out of the trash while reading said paper and waiting for Valentine to arrive for their shift. It seemed that his regular patrol partner was in the middle of some fair amount of controversy lately, although the exact problem was a bit of a mystery to the rodent. The Commander had decided to take him as a second mate, which really upset a lot of people because bipeds worried about strange things, only now people were starting to calm down because it had gotten out that the Commander had rescued Valentine from some sort of underground prison, and of course, that was story stuff, there, couldn’t argue with that.

Granted, given the history of the educated rodents, Flavours understood that you actually _could_ argue with story stuff, and that it was actually a good idea to sort out whether you were dealing with actual story stuff or just something with the same shape as story stuff, because a clever person (whether human, rat, or cat) could exploit you if you couldn’t tell which it was. Flavours suspected that both Valentine and the Commander were clever enough to do that exploiting, but he didn’t bother mentioning his suspicions to the bipeds. If this was what it took to get them to stop getting worked up over something not worth getting worked up about, he was content to leave it alone.

Flavours swallowed his bit of newspaper and looked up as the sound of Valentine’s internal fans alerted him to the other’s approach. “Hey, Nick!” he greeted cheerfully.

Out of habit, Valentine put his hand down on his desk so Flavours could scurry up it and onto the synth’s shoulder. “Flavours,” he greeted as he moved the newspaper to the corner of his desk, in case the rat wanted to finish it later. “Well, at least you don’t seem to have a problem with me these days,” he muttered ruefully.

Flavours shrugged. “If you and the Commander want to _rllk_ , I don’t see how that’s my business. Sure, you’re not going to get any pups out of that, but Ankh-Morpork is already pretty crowded by human standards, and he’s already got pups at home, anyway. Another one in the nest’ll help with taking care of them.”

Valentine laughed at the rodent’s description as he headed towards the door to begin their patrol. “I guess rats don’t really do marriage, huh?” he asked.

Flavours shook his head. “We know about it, of course. We live among bipeds, and we read, some of us as voraciously as we eat, so we know the idea, but it’s not really something we do. To me, it just seems like some sort of weird human hang-up.”

“I’m not human,” Valentine pointed out, tone faintly amused.

“Well, sure, but you’re a _synthetic_ human, right?” Flavours asked. “So wouldn’t that mean that you have synthetic human hang-ups?”

The synth detective sighed. “Y’know, Flavours,” he said wryly, “I think it just might.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** Art for this chapter provided by [jerkyvulture](https://jerkyvulture.tumblr.com/) over at Tumblr. Go give them some love!
> 
> **S:** I have… so many problems with the Um golems and how they’re handled in the books. Of course, the biggest and most obvious problem is the way they’re declared to be “unfreeable” within a few hours of them showing up in Ankh-Morpork, despite the fact that just those few hours before nearly everyone involved had thought they were dealing with four gold golems rather than four thousand golems. But I also have problems with the underlying assumptions about the culture of Um itself. 
> 
> Supposedly, the Um culture invented golems, and because they had golems they never invented anything else or otherwise advanced culturally because they had golems to tend to all their needs for them and people apparently only become inventive when they have to do so out of need. Except that… Pratchett repeatedly glorifies characters who are able to be inventive geniuses precisely _because_ their basic needs are already met. There’s the way Willikins talks up the accomplishments of the previous Ramkins (the wealthiest family in Ankh-Morpork at the start of the series, remember) in Snuff, there’s Dick Simnel in Raising Steam who has an inheritance because his grandfather was a pirate. There’s Hubert Turvy _in the very same book that introduces the Um golems and describes the Um culture as stagnant_ , just for starters.
> 
> So whatever the intended message was, there ends up being an implied, “Well, it’s okay for the _right_ kind of people to have their needs met through wealth that they didn’t earn, but if it was just _everybody_ , that would be bad.” Pratchett was a wonderful, witty, and insightful writer, but like everyone else, he had biases that occasionally showed through in his work, and I feel like this was the result of one of them.
> 
> **S:** This week we added a one-shot scene that more or less fits in this time period, but didn’t really belong in the fic proper. If you read it, check out [An Android Walked Into A Bar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25861702/chapters/62836843) over in **Valentine & Vimes: Illegal Crossbows, **which will serve as our non-explicit one-shots collection for this series.
> 
> **The next chapter, chapter 16, is a _sexually explicit chapter_**. If you wish to avoid sexually explicit content, feel free to skip it and rejoin us next week with chapter 17.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	16. Wanted or Needed, Longed For or Loved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has _**sexually explicit**_ _**content**_. If that’s not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us for chapter 17.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Wanted or Needed, Longed For or Loved_

Shaun had a black eye, and young Sam had a nasty bruise on his forearm. Sybil had already gotten the story out of the boys, which was that little Alphonse Pandy had opined that men like their father were a disgrace and ought to have their family jewels chopped off and then Otis Murphy had chimed in that they should be hung and Vernon Hislop had said they deserved to be hung by the family jewels. Then Sterling Strachan pronounced witherlingly that it was their mum’s fault for not keeping their father’s interest.

So, quite reasonably, young Sam had decked him, starting a schoolboy brawl that had spread to also include Shaun. They both had detention for a week.

“Did anyone have to see an Igor?” asked Vimes, looking his boys over with a look in his eyes that suggested that if he ever occasioned to meet the parents of Alphonse, Otis, Vernon, and Sterling, that _someone_ would be needing the services of an Igor.

“Oh, nah,” said young Sam.

“Then it wasn’t much of a brawl, then,” Vimes said dismissively. “The important thing is that you’re both safe and well and that I can see that my boy Sam here has figured out how to block with his arms. Shaun, I’m going to have to work on that with you. Sybil, have you spoken with Miss Susan about…?”

“She said she had a few diversity modules in mind,” Sybil said mildly, “I’m going to bring your Mister Valentine around the parent-teacher meeting this week, so Miss Susan’s familiar with him in case he has to pick up the boys.”

Vimes said, amused, “Tell her that Nick should be easy to spot. He's always wearing that old hat and trench coat getup.”

After dinner and looking in on homework, Valentine explored what was to be his room. It was covered in about an inch of dust. Just wandering in the door turned one into a fuzzy, grey ghost. 

“Bugger,” said Vimes, his arms crossed. “I’d asked Willikins if I could have this room aired out.”

The room was the room on the other side of Vimes’s dressing room, and Vimes said it was a bit smaller than his and Sybil’s room, but Valentine could have fit two of his apartment inside. He had his own dressing room. Codsworth was showing an interest in claiming for himself the duty of putting out Valentine’s clothes for him. Valentine didn’t know how he felt about that.

He didn’t know how he felt about a lot of things, these days.

Vimes paced over to the bed and pushed on it with his hand, frowning. “I’d asked if we could have this mattress changed out for a softer one.”

Valentine gingerly walked through the dust, which rose in clouds around him, and pushed on the bed himself. As far as he could tell, under the flat, limp, ancient duvet, the mattress was filled with rocks, and not just any rocks: vindictive ones that just might be small, angry trolls. “Y’know, if you want to spend the night with Sybil -”

Vimes said stonily, “This is my night with you. We’re not going off the rails. We’ll go down to one of the sitting rooms; we can find a sofa.”

So Valentine ended up sitting on a sofa, in a faded blue nightgown that had belonged to some ancestor of Sybil who’d been about his build, because that was apparently the correct attire for sleeping, which was something Valentine didn’t really do. He fiddled with the tension on his right hand with a screwdriver, feeling nervous. Valentine still felt guilty. He knew he was going to feel guilty for a long time. Maybe he’d feel guilty forever.

Vimes locked the sitting room door, sat down next to Valentine, and commented, “I used to sleep on the sofa down here, sometimes. I’d get in late, and I wouldn’t want to wake Sybil. Then she told me that she’d rather have me with her, even if I did wake her up.”

Sybil would rather have Vimes with her, and here Valentine was, keeping Vimes away from her. Valentine would have sat there, marinating in his shame, but Vimes scooted closer and grabbed Valentine by the shoulders and kissed him, a good, proper kiss. Valentine had missed that, and he bent down into the kiss. Vimes climbed onto Valentine’s lap and reached down for the hem of Valentine’s gown.

Valentine debated just how much he wanted to cockblock himself. 

Screw it, a relationship took communication, so at least one of them had to open channels. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you kissing me, but… erm. We should probably talk about a few things?”

Vimes paused, studying Valentine. “About what?”

“About, oh…” Valentine sighed. “Look, I love you, you know that, right? But, it’s just… you left me. For three months. And then there was a scandal. And then Tektus tried to get the location of the launch key out of your head using an elf so he could blow up the city. And _then_ you proposed.”

Vimes shifted uncomfortably on Valentine’s lap and looked away. “I’d asked Sybil about asking you to marry me before Dilibrat grabbed me.”

“But after the scandal. Which you think will die down and go away if we marry because stably married people are boring. Would you have asked at all, if that game render hadn’t leaked?” asked Valentine.

Vimes hesitated. “Sybil and I had talked a little along those lines, before even that.”

Valentine repeated, “Would you have asked at all?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Vimes. “I think I would have. I should have sooner. I should have… introduced you to Sybil as my boyfriend, and the three of us should have sat down and talked about… this.” He gestured vaguely.

“But you didn’t,” Valentine said softly. He didn’t know how it would have gone over, if Vimes had done that. He wrapped his arms around Vimes, anyway.

“I wanted to apologize to Sybil and do the right thing. What I did by you was wrong. I never should have treated you that way.” Vimes tucked his head under Valentine’s chin, against his chest. “I’d like to make it up to you.”

“You gave me a nice speech about how we made good partners and then threw a snit fit when Captain Carrot tried to put us on patrol together,” observed Valentine, though he brought up his hand and stroked his fingers through Vimes’s hair.

Vimes winced in his arms. “I was upset that Carrot thinks I need a babysitter. I swear, get kidnapped by one madman and people think you can’t handle yourself anymore.”

Valentine couldn’t help himself; he had to deadpan, “I thought you wanted me to handle you.”

Vimes looked up and laughed and kissed Valentine again, bringing up a hand to the angle of his jaw to pull him closer. His other hand pulled up the hem of Valentine’s gown some more. “Oh yes. Definitely.” Then he chewed his lip pensively. “I did wonder. Were you… with anyone else?”

“What, in the last three months?” Valentine snapped. “No. This may come as news to you, doll, but most folks don’t find Unalive to be a good look, and anyway, I… was busy missing you. Actually, I…” Valentine thought a bit, frowning, as he remembered he was a fictional character made real and that most of his memories had never actually happened. “...I’ve never been with anyone who wasn’t you.” He considered that. “Huh. You popped my cherry.”

Vimes blushed, eyes wide, and ducked his head down against Valentine’s chest. He made a sort of burbled ‘erk’ noise, and Valentine stroked his hair and down his neck. When Vimes had recovered himself, he said weakly, “I suppose, Nick, if I’ve spoiled a virgin, I absolutely have to marry you.”

Valentine laughed. “Oh yeah, definitely, doll. C’mere.” They kissed some more, and Valentine let Vimes take his gown off, and Vimes got his own gown off, and they made themselves busy examining each others’ collections of scars with hands and mouths, body to body, pressed close together.

Damn it, but Valentine had missed Vimes so hard that his support struts ached, and laying against him again, fingers trailing along broken and rebroken ribs, mouth sucking on one of his nipples, tongue flicking across, was just what he’d needed. He needed the taste of Vimes’s sweat in his mouth, his fingers digging into his shoulders, the sound of his gasps and whimpers. Valentine could have listened to that all night long.

Vimes was going to need sleep, though, and he seemed to want something a bit more substantial on the menu before he had to put his head down for the night, as he pushed Nick back against the sofa and shifted their positions so he could duck his head between Valentine’s thighs. He pulled back Nick’s synthetic foreskin and helped himself hungrily to Nick’s cock.

If Vimes liked oysters as much as he liked meat and veg, Lady Sybil was probably a very happy woman, Valentine thought, reaching down to cup the back of Vimes’s head and push him down harder. That mouth of his was hot and wet, and his tongue knew his way about Valentine’s cock. His hand pumped along the shaft, and the other reached for the small of Valentine’s back. Valentine’s hydraulics engaged, pressuring, as Vimes enthusiastically tended to him. Valentine thrust into Vimes’s mouth. He certainly _felt_ wanted, as he pumped Vimes’s face only for Vimes to look up at him with encouraging eyes.

Vimes came back up on his lap, his cock up against Valentine’s, and he stroked them both and kissed him deeply, before nibbling along his jawline and nuzzling his neck. Valentine wrapped his arms around him and held him tightly. He kissed the top of his head and murmured, “I missed you so much, doll.”

Vimes admitted haltingly, “I missed you, too.”

Valentine pushed him down onto the floor, onto a throw rug that appeared to have been made from an owlbear, and held him down and smothered his mouth with his own and arched into him as Vimes spread his legs and wrapped them tightly around Valentine’s hips. One of Vimes’s hands gripped the back of Valentine’s head, holding him down against him as their tongues slid against each other. His other hand fumbled at his discarded nightgown. The nightgowns had pockets, and he pulled out a bottle of a viscous liquid and a few small packets. Valentine glanced at them sidelong: a bottle of Mrs. Proust’s Gentlemen’s Emollient and several sonkies. Vimes had, apparently, gone to examine Valentine’s new bedroom with him with the intent of being bedded.

“You came prepared,” Valentine observed, “or, possibly, prepared to come.” He grinned. Being desired gave him a nice, warm glow, like radioactivity.

“Do you still have that naughty book?” Vimes asked hopefully.

“Not on me at the moment. It’s in my old trenchcoat pocket,” said Valentine. “I can go get it.”

Vimes’s grip on him tightened. “No, don’t go. Missionary’s fine.” Possibly the only sort of missionary that anyone was excited about.

“Top or bottom?” Valentine asked.

Vimes said longingly, “I could use a good buggering.”

Valentine wished Vimes wouldn’t put it that way, but he’d take it. He grabbed the lube and experimentally dripped a bit of it onto his fingers. It seemed like a silicone-based lube, although he wasn’t sure if Ankh-Morpork had invented silicone yet, which meant it could be anything, really. The bottle said ‘herbal’, but belladonna was a herb, which was, incidentally, used in different aspects of courtship. He reached between them to rub both their cocks with his synthetic flesh hand, and he tried to insert a slippery lubed metal finger into Vimes’s ass.

Vimes was wound up tight, Valentine quickly found. It stood to reason, if Vimes’s ass hadn’t been getting any attention - Valentine didn’t want to speculate too much about what Vimes did with his wife - that he might need to relearn how to, if not relax, because he seemed constitutionally unable to relax, loosen up a bit. So Valentine took his time, playing with Vimes. He squirmed up against Valentine, a bundle of nerves. 

"This'll be our first time here, not in some unreal simulation," Valentine mused. So far, it didn't seem much different from their early attempts, aside from the fact that Valentine felt much guiltier about it all and the nagging wistful thought that he wished his partner cared a bit more about him. In the Commonwealth, Valentine had been able to tell himself that Vimes was just emotionally shut down, like so many were. Now, Valentine had seen how Vimes looked at Lady Sybil, heard how he talked about her. Vimes was clearly capable of loving someone. 

Valentine wished that he was one of those people that Vimes loved. 

But Vimes had asked him to marry him and to move in, and the physical attraction was definitely there, as he moaned and his body pressed eagerly against Valentine's. He seemed to care, at least. Vimes got very upset whenever someone said something ill of Valentine. A little too upset, really. There was a difference, though, between care and love. 

All Valentine wanted was something in this world or in all worlds that was really his, that wasn't the faded echo of an unreal ghost. It hurt like Hell to be so close and so far. Lady Sybil said she was willing to share, but she didn't need to worry. Vimes loved her. There wasn't even any contest. Vimes had gone right to her the moment he saw her, and he had only returned, much later, to pick up Valentine when it was convenient for him. It wasn't that Vimes had two partners, it was that Valentine was firmly number two and he felt like number two, too. 

"Nick, stop mucking about with your fingers and get your prick in me," said Vimes, which curtailed further ruminations about how much Valentine felt sorry for himself. 

Valentine positioned himself at Vimes's anus and rubbed up and down with his cock head, teasing him, until in frustration, Vimes pushed back against him, pulling in just the tip of him. Then Vimes's hands clenched on Valentine where he was gripping him, his ass spasmed down, his eyes widened, and he made a sort of _erk_ noise. 

"Eyes bigger than your ass, huh?" Valentine asked. "You want me to pull out and finger you some more?" 

"No!" Vimes snapped. "I want your cock in my arse."

Valentine rolled his eyes at Vimes’s stubbornness. He'd just have to screw him very, very slowly, then. "And what a nice, tight ass it is, too. You really do need a dicking down, don't you?" 

" _Yes_ ," said Vimes, who pushed up against him and winced again. 

Valentine took hold of Vimes’s hip with his metal hand and his cock with his synthflesh one and gave him some firm strokes. “Maybe leave this to me, doll?” Vimes was pent-up and horny, and Valentine suspected he had a better idea of what kind of pacing Vimes could handle than Vimes did. Valentine leaned down and kissed him, which was the main thing this position had going for it, that he could screw Vimes and kiss him at the same time. Then, slowly, gently, he eased his way in deeper while Vimes’s attention was suitably divided between the handjob and the smooching. God, but Vimes was deliciously tight on him.

He nuzzled back against Vimes’s ear and murmured, “That’s it, doll. You feel so good on my cock.”

Vimes made a muffled _mmph_ noise as Valentine started taking him in slow, lazy strokes. He’d linger a moment, when he was hilted, before withdrawing until he was almost all the way out, just his cockhead inside that well-lubed, willing ass. Then he’d press back in all over again, tugging on Vimes’s hip to manhandle him closer. Vimes’s ass started to welcome his thrusts, granting him easier passage.

“Good, good, sweetheart. Loosen up for me. Show me how much you need this,” encouraged Valentine. He sped up just a fraction as Vimes panted and moaned under him.

“Show me how much you need me.”

Vimes took a hand off Valentine’s shoulder and cupped the back of his head, pushing it down for another kiss. His ass squeezed deliberately, beautifully on Valentine. Valentine screwed him until Vimes came and then screwed him some more, until Valentine came. Then they cuddled together, a mess of sweat and stickiness. They kissed each other all over, aimlessly, discovering each other anew.

Vimes sighed. “I’m going to need a bath. Bugger.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** Boy, it took us a _lot_ longer this time around to get back to these two screwing, huh?
> 
>  **A:** I'd like to comment that Sam does actually love Nick and Sybil equally, but Sam isn't good at expressing this, and Nick has self-esteem issues that keep the otherwise perceptive detective from seeing it on his own.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	17. Nonrefundable * DiMA & Taxes - Day 3: A. E. Pessimal * Failing Reality * DiMA & Taxes - Day 4: Creaser * Ravishing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter song.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Nonrefundable * DiMA & Taxes - Day 3: A. E. Pessimal * Failing Reality * DiMA & Taxes - Day 4: Creaser * Ravishing _

Lady Rust was calmly, quietly furious, or she fancied herself so. The servant that she’d had flogged for delivering the newspaper might have disagreed.

Vimes!

The man thought he could just get away with getting himself kidnapped and poisoned and proposing to an abomination, did he? Of course, that funny Tektus fellow that she’d wound up like a timebomb and let totter off on his own was going to hang; that was fine.

Lady Rust didn’t mind that her brother was dead. Because he was gone, she was the heiress to the family’s fortune and power. No, if Gravid Rust hadn’t died, she would have been necessitated to arrange the situation herself.

If someone with class, like Lord Downey, had arranged for Gravid Rust to be dead, Lady Rust would have found that quite agreeable. Instead, a jumped up copper with ideas beyond his station had led to Gravid taking a holiday in Fourecks, where he’d run afoul of some venomous spiders. The wrong class of person had, however indirectly, caused Gravid’s death. That was what rankled.

To add insult to injury, that same Vimes had gone whining about safety concerns to Archchancellor Ridcully, like a babe pulling at his mother’s apron, and he’d gotten her _Aftermath_ icono-game cancelled.

Now, the game would have begun losing money shortly, according to her own projections. Lady Rust had planned on pulling the plug herself soon, while there were still coffers to ransack. It just rankled that she hadn’t done it herself. It was the principle of the thing.

As it was, Lady Rust was left with a horrible massive pile of money to console herself with because the original price and the subscriptions were nonrefundable and no one had read the fine print.

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 3: A. E. Pessimal_

A. E. Pessimal looked at the note he’d been given. It was in Drumknott’s handwriting, and it had been signed by the Patrician. He recognized both the handwriting and the signature. The note directed that he was to allow one DiMA to shadow him for a day of forensic accounting.

“Why? This isn’t a patrol day for me. I’m just going through ledgers,” said Pessimal, confused.

“The Patrician thinks it will be instructive for me to see a certain mindset in operation,” said DiMA, who was an odd thing. Constable Valentine was a little bit strange, but his brother brought to mind the word ‘otherworldly’.

Pessimal enjoyed his job. He knew he did important work. Pessimal took pride in it, in fact. He had, however, long given up on others finding the details interesting. So his question was, “Why are you being punished by Lord Vetinari?”

DiMA gave him a wan look and said nothing. 

Pessimal cleared his throat. “Do you know how to read a ledger?” Many people didn’t, or at least, that was often their excuse when Pessimal found something wrong with one of theirs.

“Assume I don’t,” DiMA suggested.

Pessimal went over the proper way to read a ledger, starting with the first one on his desk, and pointed out the errors as he found them. DiMA gave every appearance of actually paying attention. It was rather uncanny. He went through a few more. The Watch needed to pay Miss Laredo Cronk a call. Based off these records, the ‘stealth archeologist’ was cooking her books. Pessimal made of a note of it.

“Is it making sense?” asked Pessimal.

“Yes and no,” said DiMA.

“What part isn’t making sense?” said Pessimal.

“Mostly the socioeconomic history that led to this particular system,” DiMA said absently, seemingly looking at nothing at all.

“Ah. I’ve some books about it I can let you borrow, but I need to get this stack done by lunch.” He tapped the pile and picked one out that looked easy, handing it to DiMA. “See if you can work through this one.”

DiMA handed it back. “Ponzi scheme.”

Pessimal looked it over. DiMA wasn’t wrong. He handed DiMA another one. DiMA handed it back. “Addition error. They mistook a 1 for a 7.”

Morbidly curious, Pessimal gave DiMA a few more, and DiMA came up with, “Deliberately inflated assets valuation,” and “Undervaluation of goods received in lieu of taxes,” and “This ledger was written by a troll familiar with base four.”

Pessimal checked DiMA’s work. His shadow _had_ paid attention. That was unusual. Pessimal smiled. He had a packed sandwich, but he went downstairs for a cup of tea. Behind him, in the hallway, the Commander loomed in his doorway and demanded of his shadow, “What are you doing here?”

“Shadowing,” replied DiMA. “I have a note from the Patrician.”

Pessimal returned, cup of black tea in hand, and he saw DiMA holding up his note for the Commander.

“Why is the Patrician having you shadow my forensic accountant?” growled the Commander.

Pessimal was not one for social graces. He could not read a mood. His patrol partners had remarked upon it. There was that time when he had straight-faced suggested that it was only logical for a starving mother to eat her newborn, in the dreadful algebra of life.

Even he could tell there was some tension between the Commander and his shadow for the day.

The fact was, anyone who was as good as DiMA was with numbers could get up to quite a bit of trouble, Pessimal well knew.

“His Lordship thinks it will be useful for me,” said DiMA.

“Oh, really? Going to do a spot of accounting, are you?” snapped the Commander.

“Not as such,” said DiMA.

Pessimal was an accountant’s accountant, and he was also a copper, and DiMA was assuredly being evasive. He made a mental note to look into DiMA’s books, unaware that some of DiMA’s books might look back.

“Don’t let him hold you up,” Vimes warned, looking at Pessimal.

“He’s been helpful, sir,” said Pessimal.

“Oh yes. He does that,” said Vimes sourly.

They finished the ledgers early, and Pessimal wrote out several neat reports. He spent the rest of the afternoon explaining gripping topics such as embezzlement, money laundering, mortgage fraud, disorganized crime, Ponzi schemes, securities & commodities fraud - they’d had a case of that down at the pork futures warehouse just last week - terrorist financials, and of course, the perennial Ankh-Morpork favourite of insurance fraud and how it often manifested as arson for profit.

After the shift wrapped up, DiMA thanked Pessimal and said that it had been instructive and that he would return the books Pessimal was lending him soon, although he did have some grading to finish for Mister Stibbons -

“Ponder Stibbons,” Pessimal said flatly, narrowing his eyes. “A worthy opponent.”

“...opponent?” DiMA asked, head tilted to the side.

“Mister Stibbons handles most of Unseen University’s finances, with the Bursar… indisposed. The university, by law, is meant to pay the city $200 in taxes per head per annum, but there is an unwritten agreement that the university will donate the money to the city instead,” said Pessimal, pacing.

“How does that work with university employees who make less than $200 per annum?” asked DiMA softly.

“Not well, truth be told, but it’s the principle of the thing. By donating the money rather than paying it as taxes, it becomes a charitable donation and thus a tax deduction.” Pessimal’s hands clenched to fists. “One day, Stibbons is going to slip up, and that day, I’ll be there.”

* * *

At the end of the day, Nick found DiMA in the High Energy Magic Building with a stack of books on taxation large enough to construct a small fort on the desk he was occupying, and a somewhat distressed expression. The student wizards who were usually around DiMA were engaged in a spirited argument about slood dynamics. On both accounts, Nick decided not to ask. Instead, he greeted, “Hey, DiMA. Could I talk to you somewhere a little quieter?”

DiMA looked up from _Land Value Taxation: An Applied Analysis_ with a faintly guilty expression on his face and replied carefully, “Certainly, brother. We could use one of the study rooms? They are often unused.” He gingerly placed the book down on his stack.

Nick waved that was fine, and DiMA took him past a giant squid in the hallway to a small study room with a black blackboard that appeared to have no writing at all on it, though the board made DiMA frown. DiMA stalked stiffly over to it, picked up a black piece of chalk, and spent a minute annotating something that Nick couldn’t even see onto the board. DiMA muttered, “Don’t try to cite Von Flamer’s experiment if you haven’t read the original manuscript backwards at midnight in front of a mirror.”

Nick didn’t ask about that, either, although he did observe that DiMA seemed… off, even for DiMA. Agitated. Upset. _Guilty_. Nick sighed, and he asked, because he had to, “DiMA, have you done anything recently, where if we had an honest discussion about it, I’d have to arrest you?”

DiMA appeared to think about that. “Hmm. No. It is certainly possible and, indeed, likely, that I have violated one of the byzantine bylaws of this city, but I think that I can safely answer, ‘No,’ to your question.” He added another invisible amendment to the board.

Nick nodded at that. He prompted gently, “Anything you wanted to talk about?”

DiMA gave Nick a wan smile. “Where would you like to start?” He reluctantly put down the black piece of chalk and sat at the study table, stealing one last glance at the board.

Perhaps that had been too broad an opening. Nick also sat down. “You seem a bit on-edge.”

DiMA looked away and said softly, “It would likely be beneficial for my continued survival not to discuss that matter.” Then he looked back. “But please, brother. What occasioned your visit?”

Nick frowned. “DiMA, if you’re in trouble, if there’s any way I can help -”

DiMA waved a hand dismissively. “Allow us to discuss instead why I have the honour of your presence.”

DiMA was in some sort of pickle and was concerned about his life, but he hadn’t recently done anything Nick would need to arrest him over and he didn’t want to talk to Nick about it. Nick decided to let it lie. He shook his head. “Right. Anyway, so Sam asked me to marry him.”

“I had heard,” said DiMA, looking pensive. “Would congratulations be appropriate?”

The whole city had heard, by now. Of course DiMA knew. Piper was going to kill him for not talking to her sooner, but Nick had been genuinely busy. “Y’know? Damned if I know. I love him. If he’d asked me in the Commonwealth, I’d have been on cloud nine. Here, it’s a whole lot stickier. He’s got a wife, and he loves her, and I’m not too popular with a big chunk of the city at the moment.”

“How quickly they forget you prevented the city from being consumed in a thaumonuclear explosion,” DiMA observed soberly.

Nick shrugged, and then he admitted something dangerous, “Anyway, look, I wanted to talk to you about… theological issues.”

Nick didn’t think DiMA could really do proper excitement, but he appeared politely interested, and Nick felt like he now had DiMA’s full attention, which was maybe more of his attention than he actually wanted. DiMA said, “Certainly, if I may be of assistance.” DiMA _liked_ being helpful, Nick knew, and philosophy was kind of his jam.

“So the original Nick Valentine was Catholic,” Nick started.

DiMA said gently, “There was no original Nick Valentine.”

“Well, okay,” Nick grumbled, rolling his optics, “but I feel like there was an original Nick Valentine, and I feel like he was Catholic, which means I’ve got a particular set of beliefs that’s mostly incomprehensible to anyone here.”

“In that regard, you are hardly unique. Most belief sets here are incomprehensible. That is largely the design intent. Beliefs are meant to be believed, not understood,” conjectured DiMA.

Nick sighed wearily, “You’re an atheist, aren’t you? And you, you’re not lightning-proof...”

“In the sense that I do not _believe_ in gods, yes. In the sense that there is good experimental evidence that powerful entities exist and wish to be referred to as gods, no,” said DiMA.

“And y’know, you’ve just hit on at least two my theological issues. One, I ought to be trying to convert you, because if you’ve got a soul, and no offense, I don’t know that I do, either, you’re my only brother, and I should want for you to find salvation,” said Nick, frowning to himself. The second issue was that the Discworld had ‘gods’ who actually did things and categorizing them as demons in the Catholic tradition didn’t quite seem to work, although he knew he was supposed to think of them as demons sent to lead people astray from God.

“No offense taken, brother,” said DiMA. “Would you like to try now?”

DiMA continued to appear politely interested, which was not the usual response to missionary overtures.

“I… I don’t even have a Bible, those don’t exist here,” stammered Nick, who hadn’t expected that response. He was also not getting anywhere near the topic he actually wanted to discuss.

DiMA offered, “Hex could obtain one for you. Which one would you like? Revised Standard Version Fifth Catholic Edition?” that one rung a vague bell, “Revised Standard Version Seventh Catholic Edition?” that one did not, “Revised Standard Version Catholic Cannibal Edition?”

“Wait, no, that can’t be,” Nick protested.

“A tradition where Catholics are cannibals who practice the ritual sacrifice of one of their flock for the high Masses, assuming the role of Jesus to provide body for bread and blood for wine exists within the phase space of all realities,” said DiMA.

“No,” Nick snarled, “That’s heresy! And how can you even know that?”

“I went through the game logs. I was curious about your religion and pulled some information from the Roundworld project,” said DiMA, shrugging.

“All realties, Roundworld project - Catholicism exists somewhere real?” Nick asked, betraying an odd sort of existential hope. He didn’t know how to describe the feeling that he might believe something that was real but that he also did not want to admit that he had ever doubted it.

“I should take you to the office of the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography,” said DiMA.

The office was sweltering, and the Professor was a thin, ratty man with a hat that said ‘Wizzard’ who was openly dubious of DiMA and somewhat more covertly dubious of Nick.

“Professor Rincewind,” DiMA greeted respectfully, and it was clear that Rincewind was also dubious of anyone who addressed him respectfully. “I would like to show my brother, Nick Valentine, the Roundworld project.”

“Is he going to nick it?” asked Rincewind, who had been gloomily sorting rocks.

“No,” said DiMA, answering on behalf of his brother.

“Are you going to nick it?” said Rincewind.

“No,” said DiMA.

“Top shelf on the left,” said Rincewind, gesturing.

DiMA nodded in thanks and brought down a box that contained something that was one part snow globe, one part actual globe, about a foot across. He explained, “When Unseen University first split the thaum in search of smaller magical particles and discovered the resons: up, down, sideways, sex appeal, and peppermint, there was a huge release of magical energy, which threatened the safety of the Disc. This energy was shunted by Hex into the Roundworld project, a set of universe phase spaces where magic does not exist. For the simulation from which we originated, Mister Stibbons pulled basic starting parameters from an instance of Roundworld where, in 2077 CE, nuclear bombs dropped, because he was curious to simulate what Mage Wars might look like without the mages. The parameters were simplified considerably, but in the set of Roundworld phase spaces, there exists a reality that would be similar, in a topographic sense, to the Commonwealth and Far Harbour, although we would likely not recognize it.”

Nick let that sink in. “Our icono-game was based off a parallel timeline of a universe that sits in a box in this office?”

“Almost entirely wrong in every sense, but suitable for the purposes of this conversation,” said DiMA. He gingerly put the Roundworld project back up on the shelf.

Nick said slowly, “Catholicism exists in a universe that was created by people from this one?” 

“It may be useful for you to think of it that way,” DiMA suggested gently, and he led Nick out of the office and back to the study room. Nick swore that the way back was entirely different than the way they had come.

“See, humans are fallible.” Nick confessed. “They don’t always interpret the word of God correctly. Given that the Vatican got nuked, I guess I was just hoping that might be a sign that maybe God wasn’t so pleased about some things and that maybe, just maybe telling queer folks that their inherent nature is a sin would suggest a sadistic God, which would be incompatible with the rest of our teachings, so I could just kind of ignore that bit.”

“We aren’t human,” DiMA reminded softly.

“We’re fallible, too,” Nick snapped.

“You speak of sin. I mean to suggest that you are no son of Eve,” DiMA observed.

“The humans of the Institute made us, so if we have souls, we would inherit original sin from our human makers,” said Nick.

“Completely incorrect,” DiMA said gently, lovingly, “We were created by Hex, who was constructed by the Discworld Wizards Skazz and Ponder Stibbons and, largely, by himself.”

Nick paused. DiMA wasn’t wrong, there. “And there’s no real concept of _original_ sin in any of the religions here, is there? I mean, I’ve mostly just read up on Omnianism and a little on Blind Io, Offler, Tak, and Monolith. Flavours has told me some about the Big Rat. There’s sin, yes, but this seems more like the kind of place that would buy its sin secondhand, anyway. Heh. Just imagine it: Eve took the apples from the tree and brewed a scumble and got the Angel of the East Gate stinking drunk, and then she and Adam scarpered, because there was free real estate out there. That’s probably how it would have went.” He shook himself. 

“I could find you a Catholic Bible that tells you that queer polyamorous marriage is acceptable unto your God. Such a thing is plausible within the phase set of realities. However, as I already noted, I could find you a Catholic Bible that endorses cannibalism,” said DiMA, lightly arching what would have been an eyebrow. “As you have observed, humans and synths are fallible as they come to their conclusions as to the correct ways to comport themselves. I would suggest that the decision of whether or not our inherent natures are a sin is ultimately up to you, brother.”

Nick was bisexual. DiMA was some sort of queer that Nick hadn’t inquired as to the specifics. When Nick talked about his own inherent nature being a sin, he was, inadvertently, also talking about DiMA’s inherent nature being a sin. Nick found that he didn’t really want to be doing that. He had his reasons to be concerned about the sorts of things that DiMA might do, if DiMA felt forced into a corner, but Nick decided that he didn’t need to be worrying about DiMA’s romantic attractions being a sin.

So Nick didn’t need to be worrying about his own romantic attractions, either.

Which left bigamy as one of the issues troubling him. Nick sighed and slumped in the study chair. “I feel guilty, because I feel like I’m taking Sam’s time away from Lady Sybil.”

“Is she bothered?” DiMA asked.

“Not really. We’re actually going to go catch _Bloodaxe and Ironhammer_ later this week,” admitted Nick. “The other thing is… Sam cares about me, okay? And he’s brave and self-sacrificing and funny and he won’t stand for injustice. But,” Nick crossed his arms, hugging himself, “I used to be able to tell myself that he loves me and he’s just too emotionally constipated to say so. He’s been through a lot. More than I know. But now, I’ve seen how he looks at Lady Sybil and how he treats her, and I’m not sure he loves me at all.”

“You deserve to be loved,” DiMA said quietly but firmly.

DiMA loved him, Nick was aware, but that was quite different, the love of a brother, not the love of a lover.

“It’s convenient, though. I like being a dad to Shaun, and young Sam’s taken to me, too. Lady Sybil’s nice enough. My friends are all here. You’re here. My job’s great, current events aside, and I love this city, even if she’s a bitch,” Nick sighed. “If I didn’t marry him, and I stayed, everyone would probably think he was sleeping with me, so we might as well be sleeping together, y’know?”

“Do you think you will be happier staying rather than going?” DiMA asked, looking concerned.

Nick thought about it. “Eventually, yeah.”

“I suppose marrying him would not seriously impede your chance of finding someone who actually loves you. He’ll only live twenty or thirty more years, unless he’s particularly lucky, so even if you waited until after his death, you'd have considerable time left to look,” speculated DiMA, rubbing his chin.

Nick sputtered, “I don’t want him to die!”

DiMA studied the reaction his conjecture had provoked. “Hmm. Yes. You’re clearly too attached to him to go courting now, anyway.”

Nick glared at DiMA. This discussion had been helpful, though, in a way, even if his head hurt to think that there was a whole set of universes sitting in a box in an overheated office. He said sarcastically. “Thanks, DiMA. So, will you be my best man for my wedding?”

DiMA tilted his head to the side. “If you explain what it entails?”

“I dunno, they do everything sideways here,” and it wouldn’t even count as a real wedding, to Nick, not being at a Catholic Church, though it did him some good to know that, statistically speaking, somewhere there was a universe where one could be Catholic and queer and not self-loathing, “but you probably have to make a speech about why Sam and me would be a good couple.”

DiMA frowned slightly. “Am I allowed to lie?”

Nick groaned, “DiMA, no.”

* * *

Terms at Unseen University were only one week long, and there were eight of them in a University year, which was a half-year in the grand celestial scheme of things. It meant that there was one term about every six weeks, with five weeks lying fallow in between. Enterprising students had applied for a concept called ‘independent study’, which basically amounted to getting University credit for goofing off between terms.

After Archchancellor Ridcully brought the _Aftermath_ icono-game incident to his attention, Ponder had carefully examined the matter with the game. It was a fascinating example of unintended emergent behaviour, from the incursions to the fact that people in bear costumes had taken to beating up folks with better subscriptions.

He had also realized that, with regards to how some of his students had been treated by a certain Professor Kai Wathen, it wasn’t that Ponder had been distracted by meetings and little accidents here and there. It was that someone had been distracting him.

Ponder did feel just a touch guilty, there. He was one of the few wizards who cared much about the ethical theory of magic, and what had happened to Chatur Bakshi, Zinon Elias, Xian Ju, and Alf Nealy was certainly unethical. Ridcully said the Lore would sort it out, and well… that wasn’t how Ponder would have handled it.

But he wasn’t Archchancellor. Yet.

Ponder had decided that he’d give it a month, and if no one had done anything about Wathen by then… well, there would be some harsh words involved, he was fairly certain.

But that was for then, and now, he had Chatur, Zinon, Xian, and Alf in his office, and he informed them, “I’m going to have to mark that independent study down as a failure, I’m afraid. Now, don’t worry, I’ve looked over your records. It’s just one class. No one’s in danger of failing out entirely.”

“But I didn’t even ask DiMA to get the Archchancellor involved!” Xian protested.

“It seems likely that if DiMA hadn’t gotten the Archchancellor involved, that you and Zinon would have died, possibly of planets,” said Ponder, frowning.

“Fine, so I would have needed to change my major to Lich Studies -” Xian started.

“One, we call that Post-Mortem Communications; it’s more polite. Two, you would have still failed the class, _and_ you’d be dead. I would have found out eventually, either way,” said Ponder.

“What was even so bad about it?” bemoaned Chatur. He hadn’t even been there for most of it, Ponder’s careful investigation had uncovered, and had only recently returned from Klatch.

Ponder inhaled. “It could have caused a critical reality cascade failure, if the nuclear reactor had gone off under the thaumic reactor. Even if it hadn’t, as unreal elements continued to be manifested in realspace -”

“‘S not like space is even that real,” Alf sulked.

“Making it less real doesn’t help,” Ponder said curtly. “The fact is, you should be content that you are merely failing this class and not reality.”

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 4: Creaser_

“It was easier in Lord Winder’s day. Lord Snapcase’s, too. We had publicans, then. Not the sort that manage a pub, oh no, although we had those, too. Publicans were public contractors. The Patrician would tell his publican that he needed this much money from the Scours, this much from Dolly Sisters, and so on, and they’d get it right smart. None of this nonsense of trying to track down individual citizens and shake them down for what’s owed,” rambled Mr. Creaser42, the septuagenarian Taxmaster of Ankh-Morpork, who was, at his age, quite nearsighted.

He might have reacted a bit differently to the clerk that Vetinari had sent around if he could see him properly, but he couldn’t.

“In your view, it changed because?” asked the clerk, who was named DiMA. That name was, what? An Uberwald name?

They didn’t have Uberwald, back in the day. No, they’d had the Evil Empire, and they knew where they stood. Creaser continued, “A publican is entitled to a bit of skim, y’see? Anything they brought in that was surplus to government requirements was theirs by right. Lord Vetinari didn’t like that, now. No, he said it encouraged publicans to pressure taxpayers to switch their ec’nomic activity from long-term projects to short-term cash grabs. Bah! The lot of ‘em ought to have just been happy they had jobs, and begging wasn’t a job then, no.”

“I was given to understand that the Beggars’ Guild is the oldest in the city?” asked DiMA.

“It’s been around, like rats and wizards, but they’ve gotten airs above their station since Lord Vetinari’s been at the helm,” Creaser sneered.

“So individual capitation43 taxes are levied based off one’s location of residence?” inquired DiMA.

“Capitation and decapitation, as needs be… Yes, it’s district based, and then there’s the wealth tax. None of it works without a good census, and we don’t have that,” Creaser complained bitterly. “People come and go as they please. Folks take the train in from Sto Lat and work for the day, with sandwiches packed by the missus, and they leave just like that. All of it relies on folks filing their forms and paying at the register and getting their receipts, and they just don’t do it but for someone like Captain Carrot comin’ ‘round and holding their hands. And then the corporations and Guilds are even worse about it...”

“When there are shortcomings?” DiMA prompted gently.

Creaser looked to a large bucket that he kept in his office and nodded. “Then it’s time to go out to the districts that aren’t meeting projections and round up whoever’s there to be rounded up and shake ‘em over that bucket.”

42 [Mr. Creaser](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Creaser) still has his position. Perhaps because the whole of Disc became too distracted with steam to remove him from it....

43 [Also called head tax.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax) You’d think this would mean the people who live in nicer areas pay more per person, but those people can often afford to make tax collectors go away, and being poor is so expensive sometimes...

* * *

After he went off duty, Valentine quickly hurried over to the Wizla Tobacco, Snuff, and Rolling Paper Co., which was conveniently located near Pseudopolis Yard. They made a killing; many Watchmen were nicotine addicts. Valentine didn’t even have the excuse of addiction for why he smoked. He just liked the look, he supposed. It certainly wasn’t the smell, although he had to admit, bad tobacco did a lot to cover the general Smell of Ankh-Morpork.

He’d seen this counter clerk, one Verna Barry, before, but now, Valentine hoped she didn’t give him too much trouble. He was out of smokes, and he didn’t feel up to being hassled over his engagement again. Valentine shot a longing glance over at the glass cabinet where the better cigars were locked up. He’d have loved to have bought some for Vimes, but they were too rich for his nonexistent blood. 

When she sighted him approaching with a pack of cigarettes in hand, Verna asked, “Oh, Constable Valentine! Is it true His Grace rescued you from weeks of underground imprisonment?”

Coppers gossiped. Coppers smoked. Sure, Verna had heard. All of Ankh-Morpork would have heard by now, excepting those fine citizens who spent all their time in cellars. “Erm. Sure,” said Valentine, dropping correct change on the counter.

“And then the Duke ravished you, I expect,” Verna continued, somewhat dreamily.

Valentine stared. “Uh. No. There was no ravishing.”

“What!?” said Verna, scandalized. “You spend weeks, just languishing in bondage, and he didn’t have the common decency to at least ravish you afterwards?” She shook her head sadly.

“Sam is not a ravishing kind of guy,” Valentine said. Oh sure, they banged, but even if Vimes shoved him against a wall, he’d pause and ask if Valentine felt up for it.

“What’s this world coming to, Dukes not ravishing their rescuees? You oughta ask for a refund,” Verna opined.

Ravishment fantasies were common enough, Valentine supposed. He was very, very disturbed to find that people were having them about him and Vimes. Being called an abomination would have been easier to handle. Backing away with his cigarettes, he said, “Um… you have a good day, Verna.”

He pulled open the package, popped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it as he paced away quickly. Along the way back to the Vimes family residence, he saw that one of the many street vendors was selling flowers. They were almost certainly ‘recycled’ flowers off graves and looked a little limp, but the colour was still good. 

Did Vimes even like colours? Valentine wasn’t sure. Lady Sybil seemed to do all the decorating around their house, and it seemed like all Vimes ever wore was his uniform, his dress uniform or, sometimes, a nightgown, although he preferred to take that off as quickly as he could. Valentine smiled at the flower-seller and asked, “Well hello there, what’ve you got today?”

“Looking to spruce up your tombstone?” asked the flower seller, making the common mistaken assumption that Valentine was some sort of undead. “I’ve got regret-me-nots, puzuma lilies, love-lies-oozing. What strikes your fancy?”

“No, I’m not undead, they’re for my fiance,” corrected Valentine, who mulishly believed that being open about himself was the best policy, in the face of all contrary evidence. “How much are the coppery little ones?”

“Not undead?” said the flower seller, looking puzzled. “Oh, well, the puzuma lilies? Full penny, those.”

“No, I’m a funny sort of unalive,” said Valentine, handing over the penny and taking the small, coppery, purported-to-be puzuma lilies. Then he hurried off to the Vimes estate, finishing his cigarette along the way; no one smoked inside the house.

Vimes was puzzled by the flowers that Valentine pushed into his hand and asked skeptically, “What did I do?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Valentine deadpanned, “Although I’m hoping you might.”

Vimes blushed and looked a bit stricken. 

Lady Sybil looked at the flowers critically and said, “Those are… nice. Aren’t they nice, Sam?”

Vimes glared at the flowers as if they were particularly incriminating evidence.

“We’ll get them into some water, although at this rate, they might need coffee,” Lady Sybil speculated.

There were the beginnings of a domestic rhythm, here. Valentine would come home, if coming home was an option. He’d sit for dinner, although, he was noticing, there was only a drink for him if Codsworth put it out. He’d spend some time with the boys. Valentine would, at all costs, avoid getting into a room alone with Willikins, because he’d already wandered into the kitchen, looking for the coffee, and found Willikins there very deliberately chopping sausages. If it wasn’t his night with Vimes and Valentine didn’t have work, he’d wander off on his own purposes. This night was one of his assigned nights with Sam, and once he had him alone, he said, “So, can I take you out on a date, doll?”

“I was thinking we could have a night in, set a fire, and burn this stack of letters I have?” Vimes suggested, holding up a fistful of letters.

Valentine took one out of curiosity and made a face. He rubbed the back of his head. “The bit about you and the axe in the Rats Chamber seems anatomically implausible, I gotta admit.”

“And they say they’re the League of Decency. Such filthy imaginations they must have, to suggest that,” said Vimes, shaking his head.

“But seriously, doll, c’mon, let me take you out. We can burn the flame letters later,” said Valentine, taking Vimes’s hands.

Vimes looked wary, although that wasn’t much different from his baseline. “Where did you want to go?”

“The Dwarf Bread Museum. Captain Carrot lent me the key and said I could let myself in,” said Valentine.

Vimes made a face. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay in and torch letters?”

“Doll, this wasn’t even Plan B, believe me. I wanted to take you dancing,” started Valentine.

Vimes didn’t quite let him finish, insisting, “I’m not a good dancer. I’d step on your face.”

Valentine frowned, “I think you mean step on my feet?”

“No,” admitted Vimes. “I’m really not very good.”

Valentine put that aside and tried to finish his earlier train of thought, “Before all this,” he gestured at nothing much, “I’d found a few dance halls that would let me in, which was hard enough as it was. The human ones didn’t want me. The undead ones didn’t want me. The nonhuman race-specific ones didn’t want me. Because folks like to dance with folks they might take home, if they’re lucky, and the premises don’t want dancers on the floor no one wants to dance with. And look, I’m talking I was actually paying, not just sneaking in. And now they don’t want me, even if I’m paying, because maybe I found the few dance halls where folks are open-minded enough to dance with satyrs and centaurs from the Ramtops and harpies from Ephebe, but those little niche dance halls still don’t want queers, and as for the queer dance halls,” his lips curled with distaste. “If you ain’t a willowy human man in a flouncy shirt, forget about it, and if you ain’t undead, don’t even think about trying the undead ones.”

Vimes looked angry, but he usually looked angry. He also looked thoughtful. “Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. I… hmm. Yes. The Dwarf Bread Museum. Sounds… like a Plan C? Let’s go.”

* * *

Vimes and Valentine walked to the museum, and Vimes let Valentine take his hand, because he seemed to want to. As they walked, Vimes thought.

Vimes could see that going on A Date was important to Valentine, though it took a bit for that understanding to sink in. Valentine wanted to Get Out Of The House, and he wanted to do so with Vimes. Sybil would have just put something on his calendar, and Vimes would have found himself at some party, and he would have found an appropriate shadow in which to lurk. Where Valentine went wrong was in giving Vimes the illusion of choice, of phrasing it as if not going to the Dwarf Bread Museum was an option.

Still, Vimes saw that now, and he’d told Valentine he was going to do better by him. He had to, for the sake of fairness, and Vimes loathed unfairness. He was still trying to puzzle out what, exactly, he was supposed to be doing by Valentine. Vimes had been a fiancé before, himself, but that wasn’t much help for guidance. He’d been alternately drunk, depressed, contemplating his retirement and his own loneliness, and struggling with the Gonne murders during his first engagement. What did suspicious old coppers want? Valentine didn’t even eat, so bacon was out of the question. 

Vimes thought a bit about the little coppery flowers, past their prime, if they’d ever had one, that Valentine had given him. He’d probably have to buy Sybil flowers, now, which he didn’t remember to do nearly as often as he should have, but she liked a better class of flower. Snapdragons, for preference. Was he supposed to buy Valentine flowers, too? Sybil had never bought him flowers, but she bought him cigars and the fine silver case they went in and his prized crossbow…

Valentine _wanted_ to take him dancing, which mostly demonstrated that Valentine wanted some recreational hazards, but it burned Vimes up that Valentine had apparently looked into the matter and found that he couldn’t. Vimes, who avoided dancing like the Pseudopolis plague, now found that he wanted to go dancing with Valentine. Spite was a powerful motivator.

Vimes was used to people not telling him about whole classes and races of oppressed people and then blundering into the information on his own. He was not used to belonging to an oppressed class of person that no one was telling him about. He was familiar with hate letters and hate thrown daggers and hate cyanide in his sugar bowl. Vimes had plenty of all that over Dorfl, Cheery, Reg Shoe, Sally, his policies with the Deep Downers, the goblins, Rust, his choice of school for young Sam, where the chef bought the muesli… What was different here, was that the League of Decency wasn’t mad at him for, say, supporting Dorfl. The League was mad at him over something he was.

It was a bit madly fascinating. Vimes was going to hold Valentine to his promise that they could torch the letters together later. He needed to set _something_ on fire.

As they walked, Vimes noticed again how people reacted to Valentine. There were people who thought he was a sort of zombie and gave him a wide berth. There were people who thought he was a sort of golem and alternatively either ignored him or looked baffled he was holding hands with a human. There were people who ignored him so hard that they walked into him. There were people who could tell what he was, shrieking that they’d seen him in the paper, and who became rather wroth, and Valentine would quickly hurry away from them. Finally, there were those who seemed to know Valentine, and he’d give them a friendly greeting that they’d return.

Valentine knew all sorts of people, it seemed, and it seemed that the decent ones more or less just accepted that Valentine wanted to settle down and that who he was settling down with did not matter much. People generally didn’t recognize Vimes if he was out of formal uniform, but Vimes had been introduced to a few of them because Valentine was chatty and personable like that.

One, an employee at Sprockett & Flannel, on the way to the night shift, opined, “What, him? He doesn’t look like he could carry you off.”

Vimes felt he had missed something.

Valentine looked amused and drawled, “Oh, no, we just walked out together.”

“It’s not really a proper rescue, is it, if he doesn’t carry you off?” speculated the other man, who had, Vimes noted, an ankle that didn’t quite move like his other one and went _click_ when he stepped down hard.

“I don’t insist on having a traditional man,” said Valentine, smirking.

“If it suits you, I suppose,” he said, lips pursed together with slight disapproval. “We’ve gotten in that gearing you were asking about.”

“Great! I’ll be around later to check that out,” said Valentine, and he smiled and headed off.

Vimes poked him.

Valentine shrugged. “Hey, _you_ told ol’ Sarge Colon that you rescued me from underground captivity, doll. Now you get to deal with everyone thinking you must have carried me off and ravished me, too.”

Vimes locked up and turned beet red. Valentine slipped his hand around the small of his back and gently pushed him forward, so that they kept walking. When his words returned, Vimes asked in a small voice, “Did you want to be carried off and ravished?”

Valentine laughed. “Maybe later, after the museum. Could be fun.”

At the museum, as it turned out, Valentine must have actually paid attention to Carrot, because Valentine was wittering on about drop scones.

"So you really think this," Vimes waved around vaguely, "is interesting?"

"Sure, why not? Bread-weapons are a new idea for me. Not like anyone baked ballistic biscuits back in the Commonwealth." Valentine glanced at a particularly ancient loaf. "I mean, we had plenty of centuries-old food lying around, but it's not like anyone tried to weaponize it or anything." He muttered as an afterthought, "Come to think of it, that might have been a better use for some of that stuff than eating, anyway..."

Vimes, who had eaten Fancy Lads Snack Cakes of his own free will, admitted, “It just might.”

He wondered if he ought to tell Valentine that this museum was involved in two entirely unrelated crimes. Then Vimes wondered why he was even questioning if he should mention it. Of course he should tell Valentine. “There was a murder here, years back. Mr. Hopkinson. Clubbed to death with dwarf bread.”

Valentine immediately lit up with interest, and Vimes found himself telling Valentine the whole thing, at least as much of it as he knew and was at liberty to disclose. He had to redact considerably more as he explained about the theft of the Scone. Vimes could tell that Valentine noticed what was unsaid.

They ended up making out in a back-alley, as if they were teenagers, although when he’d actually been a teenager, Vimes would have taken one look at a hypothetical teenage Valentine and run the other way, more was the pity. Vimes never would have contemplated messing around with Sybil in a back-alley, but with Valentine, who walked dark alleys in the rain like he’d been made for it, it felt more than right.

A prospective mugger took one look at the rough devil getting off with someone with glowing eyes and decided he wanted none of that, although there was a muttered, “Bloody clockwork monsters, stealing our Ankh-Morpork men,” as the thug departed.

* * *

A little less than half a block from the Vimes residence, Vimes physically picked up Valentine. Valentine knew that Vimes was significantly stronger than he looked and that Vimes seemed to be able to lift almost arbitrary weights if he didn’t think too hard about it. When Valentine had been thinking that Vimes might be a synth, that had seemed to make sense. Now that Valentine knew Vimes was almost certainly human, he had no good excuse for why Vimes could pick him up and carry him.

He decided not to inspect the matter too closely, lest Vimes’s back suddenly catch up with the rest of him and decide to lodge a formal protest. Instead, Valentine said, “Goodness! Now I think I’m supposed to put up some token protest here, to establish my bonafides as a good rescuee who wouldn’t put out for just anyone but who is secretly longing for you to have your way with me?”

He cuddled up against Vimes and stroked along his jaw in what he hoped was a languid fashion. There was stubble there. There usually was. 

In short order, Vimes set him down on Valentine’s bed. Thanks to Codsworth, the room was now dust free and had a significantly softer mattress. “Token protest? You’re not going to slap me, are you?” He eyed Valentine’s metal hand.

“No, but you can pretend I did. And then you ought to tear off my clothes,” said Valentine.

Vimes looked dubious. “They’ve got years of good wear left on them.”

“Then just undress me, but maybe pull my shirt above my head so it sort of traps my wrists?” Valentine suggested.

Vimes did.

Valentine wriggled and deadpanned, “Yes, I’m totally restrained and helpless. Oh dear.”

Vimes broke down laughing and buried his face against Valentine’s chest to muffle his laughter, and Valentine laughed, too.

Then Vimes ravished him, or at least that was what they both agreed to call it, although it didn’t meet any of the technical definitions. They spent the rest of the time before Vimes had to sleep chucking letters in the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ****S:**** This week we added a one-shot scene that more or less fits in this time period, but didn’t really belong in the fic proper. If you read it, check out [Well Cultured](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25861702/chapters/62836885) over in ****Valentine & Vimes: Illegal Crossbows.****
> 
>  **S: I have a question for those readers who are avoiding sexually explicit material.** So far in this series, we’ve been handling sexually explicit scenes by putting them in their own chapter, with warning in the chapter before and in the pre-chapter notes for the specific chapter. We enjoy those scenes, we have readers who’ve mentioned enjoying them, but at the same time we have readers who mentioned appreciating the methods of skipping we’ve provided, and we want to make the reading experience as accessible as we can without losing anything we want to keep.
> 
> The biggest downside of this is that you occasionally end up with choppy little chapters that are much shorter than our standard ones (Welcome Home isn’t as strongly impacted by this, but you can really see it in the middle section of Going Nuclear). 
> 
> An alternative we’ve been considering: embedded links and warnings in the page (similar to what we do for footnotes) that let a reader jump right past a sexually explicit section, with white space padding so that someone using those links has room to avoid the sex. This would let us give you longer chapters in fics where we have a few of these scenes grouped together (like Going Nuclear) while still giving the readers the ability to skip over and opt out. 
> 
> **We wanted to ask our readers if they have a preference for how we handle the explicit section opt-out: keep them in separate chapters even if it sometimes means very short chapters; embedded links to let you skip those sections in a longer chapter; or no preference.**
> 
> This won’t change how this fic gets posted, but we’d appreciate the feedback for how we format future fics.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	18. DiMA & Taxes, Day 5: Loan Sharking * Stranger and Stranger * DiMA & Taxes, Day 6: Mr Slant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Mysterious Stranger Theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpoDJf6PcKk&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=27&t=0s) and [Sunny Came Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKKBDFCiIA&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=27) by Shawn Colvin.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_DiMA & Taxes, Day 5: Loan Sharking * Stranger and Stranger * DiMA & Taxes, Day 6: Mr Slant _

Piper, as expected, got on Nick’s case about not talking to her sooner, but in his defense, he’d been busy with work and the boys and Sam and the beginnings of wedding planning and talking to DiMA. She also noted the hot pink rose that he’d tucked into one of the button holes of his trenchcoat and commented on it as they sat together in a coffee house frequented by writers, which happened to be called The Devil Among the Lawyers.

Nick fiddled with the rose and said, “Sam got it for me. Got me a whole bouquet, actually,” and a bouquet of snapdragons that was exactly the same size for Sybil.

“Blue did?” Piper said, grinning.

“Granted, I got him a bouquet first, and I think I embarrassed him. Also, I’m pretty sure there’s a language of flowers44 in these parts and that Sam doesn’t speak one word of it,” said Nick.

Valentine saw the man creeping in the shadows of the coffee house. He was in well-tailored, crisp black clothing that hinted at a starling’s wing. He could almost have been one of the young poets who frequented coffee houses, but his clothing was too expensive to buy on a poet’s lack-of-salary. Valentine grabbed the man’s wrist before he could strike with the twelve inch dagger. He twisted the wrist out and the dagger away and forced the man down into a chair.

After various recent debacles, Valentine had started carrying handcuffs even when he was off-duty. Nick pulled the man’s hands through the stiles of the chair back and cuffed him, the splat of the chair preventing him from pulling his hands back through. He kicked Valentine, hard, which resultantly tipped the chair over, leaving the man stuck on the floor. 

When Valentine got back to his feet, he saw that Piper had pulled out a discreet blackjack and was demanding, “Who do you think you are, coming at my boy Nicky?”

“It’s just business,” said the man handcuffed in the chair, sounding bored.

Valentine found the man’s pocket-book and pulled out a current Assassins’ Guild membership. “Merritt Crogan, huh? Might be just business, buddy, but I understand you have a choice in taking a contract.”

Crogan didn’t say anything.

Valentine fished through the pocketbook, found an envelope full of money, briefly counted it , and closed the pocketbook.

Piper demanded, “Who’s paying for the contract?”

“Miss, you know an Assassin never reveals his commissioners,” Crogan said stiffly. All the blood was rushing to his head.

“Not if he wants repeat business,” said Valentine. He sat the chair back up. “But I don’t think you’re going to be getting that. ‘Miss’ here is Miss Piper Wright, and she writes for the _Times_. You’re gonna be going down in their reviews column as an Assassin who aims for the heart on a man who doesn’t have one. You ever considered other careers?”

“Oh yeah. Zero out of five stars, would not hire to assassinate my ex-boyfriend,” said Piper, putting her hands on her hips.

“I’m a Guild graduate! I’m fully qualified!” protested Crogan.

“Did you take the mail-order class?” asked Piper.

“Is this really a job for anyone with some self-respect?” mused Valentine. “Look what it gets you. Some guy you’ve never met’s got you cuffed in a coffee shop.”

“It _is_ beneath my dignity,” Crogan admitted. “You could let me go, and I could have another try at it?”

“Ha. Ha. No,” said Valentine. “I want you to think about your life. What are you doing with yourself?”

“Right now, I’m trapped in a coffee house with a smart-arse client,” the Assassin said dourly, but he seemed to be wavering. He seemed to be aware that half the coffee house was watching the unfolding scene with interest, some out of work writers jotting down notes.

“You’re trapped in the consequences of your own choices,” said Valentine. “Is killing really any way to make a living?”

“It’s been profitable enough so far…” said Crogan, who appeared to be trying to appraise if Valentine and Piper were the killing kind.

“Oh yeah, keeps you in that fashionable black I can pick out a mile away,” drawled Valentine.

“It’s not that fashionable,” said Piper, critically.

“It’s exercise, I get to meet people -” Crogan said.

“Once,” noted Valentine.

“Once,” admitted Crogan, somewhat wistfully.

“Nicky’s one of the finest people I know,” said Piper. “You’re lucky to have met him… once.”

The Assassin closed his eyes and murmured, “Please make it quick.”

Valentine went through the rest of the Assassin’s pockets, including the secret ones, and he said, “I’m just disappointed in you. I’m especially disappointed that you’ve got four knives on you and can’t get out of a pair of handcuffs.” He put his findings up on the table, next to Piper’s cup of Crossbow coffee, a special blend guaranteed to cause cardiac arrythmias just by thinking about it.

“Two of those were in my boots!” Crogan protested.

“Did they do you any good there?” asked Valentine, owlishly.

“You know… no. Gods, none of this is doing me any good, is it? I’ve got an aching back from being cuffed down to this chair, I can tell I’m going to have a goose egg on the back of my head where I bumped it, and this whole coffee house thinks I’m a loser,” admitted Crogan,

“To be fair, you totally are a loser,” said Piper, sipping her coffee.

“I need to think this over,” said Crogan, seriously.

“Glad to hear it,” said Valentine, patting him on the shoulder. Then he took the Assassin’s own silken garrote and used it to tie his hands, so he could take back his personal handcuffs. “You just sit tight, not that you’ve got many options, eh?”

He flipped the barista a tip and looked to Piper, “Catch up with you again soon?”

“Definitely. You gotta keep me updated on your wedding plans,” said Piper.

The Watch Widows and Orphans Fund shortly thereafter found itself $500 richer.

44 [In Roundworld, it’s well known that the Victorians had a language of flowers.](http://susannaives.com/wordpress/2012/02/valentines-day-edition-the-language-of-flowers-how-to-write-a-victorian-love-letter-and-parasol-flirtations/) The Ankh-Morpork dialect contains some variances...

* * *

While Sybil had a meeting at the Friendly Flamethrowers’ League down on Pons Bridge and Valentine had work - it was funny, for Vimes, a workaholic himself, to suddenly see the downsides of partnering with a workaholic who didn’t mostly work out of the home, the way Sybil did with her dragons and running the home - Vimes dressed himself. Sybil’s family had centuries worth of clothing, and a good chunk of it fit him if he dipped into the boys’ side. They didn’t have particularly much clothing for looking like a generic lower class tradesman of no particular trade, though. Eventually, Vimes gave up, and he pulled on the trenchcoat and hat of Nick’s that Ellie had given him in the Commonwealth.

The man in the mirror looked like a mobster.

Vimes left anyway and walked down to the shabby, rented meeting hall where he had last met the BLT Defenders, or the Bent, Lavender, and Transfigurative Defenders. As he stood at the door, he had a moment’s panic that DiMA might be there and comment in that opaque, guileless way of his, ‘Aren’t you wearing my brother’s clothes, Commander?’ or Sally and her vampire nose might be there, and she’d say meekly, ‘Hello, Mr. Vimes’ or, Gods forbid, _Piper_...

But there was no one there he personally knew, although his copper’s eyes recognized the faces and silhouettes, and it was just possible that, the last time he’d come, they’d recognized the uniform more than the man, because the greeter, the human who’d bequeathed unto him an armful of pamphlets last time, tried to load Vimes down with the same armful of pamphlets. He sat down near the back, and he noticed that someone had crossed out several sections and hand-written in the margin - ‘ _Good news, Hedgehog Act and Quirmian Butcher Amendment struck down, now need to press Oblong Office re: legality of plaster work_ ’.

Plaster work had been made illegal on the grounds that any troll changing his face was probably doing so for criminal purposes, but the law ignored that, in the early days of troll migration to Ankh-Morpork, most of the endeavours available to trolls had been criminal and that any human, dwarf, or other species could walk into an Igorina’s clinic and apply the correct dollar bills and walk out a new man, woman, or anything else. Someone like Deacon could have himself made up to look like a bloody medusa, if he really wanted.

There was a double standard in plaster work being illegal for trolls, and the unfairness of it itched Vimes. A few lawyers argued that some of the changes Vetinari had made legalized plaster work; other lawyers argued against. It was currently a legal mess, and Vimes’s boys were quietly ignoring the arguments while they continued to ignore the laws against plaster work.

The gods knew, the Watch already had enough work on its plate, not that the gods, those bastards, would lift a finger to help with any of it.

That was why Vimes was at this meeting. There was work for the Watch to be done. There was a whole class of unfairly trodden upon people that he in some small way belonged to that no one had bothered to tell him about because they didn’t think he would care. If it was a dwarf issue in Ankh-Morpork, he could ask Carrot or Cheery or any of his many dwarf Watchmen. For trolls, he had Detritus and a dozen others. Vimes had zombies, golems, werewolves, gnomes, goblins, vampires, Nac Mac Feegle, a medusa, a centaur, and a bloody rat in his Watch. He could tap the restlessness of almost any group in the city just by looking at his own payroll. But when it came to _this_ particular group, who could he ask? Nick was a transplant to the city. Sally was a vampire - it was expected of her. He vaguely understood that the Watch Igorina was considered strange even by Igor standards, but to a baseline45 human, she didn’t seem stranger than any other Igor.

There had to be other inverts in the Watch, but the bow on this pickle pie was that Vimes jolly well could not go asking who they were. He saw what happened with Nick. He knew the things that ended up in his locker, even if Nick scrupulously did not tell Vimes. Vimes heard what people muttered about Sally and Igorina, when they thought they were out of earshot. He knew the kind of letters addressed to himself that he chucked into the fire. A few of the more recent hires in the Watch, the sort he’d not yet saved when they’d had their backs to a wall, had quit. No, Vimes had no one he could ask about the pulse of _this_ group, so he figured that he ought to determine it himself.

Vimes had openly admitted that the issues that he’d pushed Vetinari on, with a cake knife to the pocketbook, wouldn’t fix everything, but now, he was wondering what they might have broken.

A dwarf lady in an elegant helmet with tiny horns, a bespoke engraved breastplate, and a floor-length skirt of chainmail cheerily announced, “Today, we’re going to go around and write our identities on this banner, that we’ll use for our parade! If we can ever get registered for a parade.”

Vimes froze, and his mouth went dry. His eyes fixed on a fly-specked piece of ceiling. Dimly, he was aware that, around him, people were selecting gaudy colours and making their marks on a banner, in mine sign46, in the heavy, angular runic Oggham script of the dwarfs, in the Gothic seriph hand of zombies long dead, in the plain bad handwriting that permeated Ankh-Morpork like the smell -

Someone nudged Vimes, and he reacted and found himself holding the very surprised dwarfen lady’s wrist to the outside of her, as if they were about to brawl and he was about to lunge - no. 

Suddenly, there were eyes on him, and the troll woman that he’d seen before commented, “Hey, you that molly policeman. You not there when I ask for you at Pseudopolis Yard.” She sniffed. “They give me Constable Valentine. Him silicon wasted on men.”

Vimes _hadn’t_ said he was a molly. He’s said that he was an ally, possibly. But why was he showing up, then, if he wasn’t there to entrap anyone? No, he could see why the troll woman was assuming… 

Why were they forcing everyone to go around and say what they were? Didn’t these people, of all people, understand that some folks might appreciate a little privacy? It was pure spite, running his mouth on automatic, that made him snap, “No, I’m bisexual.”

“What, like Commander Vimes?” someone said scornfully.

“Yes. _Exactly_ like Commander Vimes,” Vimes growled, releasing his grasp on the dwarf woman. She shook her arm out and looked at him warily, glancing down at his wrist with a certain calculating realization in her eyes.

“You so-called ‘bisexuals’ are just mollies who don’t want to admit it,” said another. “Gods, you Watchmen and your swaggering machismo. Anyone can tell you’re trying too hard.”

Vimes glared and demanded, “ _Excuse me!?_ ”

The dwarf lady said firmly, “What colour do you want? For your paint.”

Dwarfs argued, yes, but a mine couldn’t afford for an argument to boil over, not when a stray punch could hit the joist that held up the ceiling.

Vimes blinked and looked at her palette of paints. “Ooh. Oh. I’ll take copper.” He scrawled ‘bisexual’ across the banner in large, angry letters.

45 It didn’t get much more baseline than Ankh-Morpork.

46 The Fabulous Dark.

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 5: Guild of Accountants and Usurers_

“Usury, not ursery,” corrected Mr. Frostrip, Head of the Guild of Accountants and Usurers, glaring at the man who’d brought around a bear on a chained spike collar and was looking to enroll as a Guild member. “And for that matter, bear baiting’s been outlawed for ages now! Even the Bear Pit is just bare-knuckle fighting, swordplay, and theatre. It’s much more acceptable to be cruel to humans and other sapient beings than it is to bears. Why do people keep making this mistake?”

“Oh no, I don’t do bear baiting,” the man corrected. “I make him pay 60% interest on all his loans.” He indicated the bear, which whimpered at the mention of 60% interest.

“Now that _is_ cruelty to bears… and you just might qualify for Guild membership,” said Frostrip, thoughtfully, sucking on the tip of his pen. He handed the man an application form.

Frostrip had a shadow for the day. Lord Vetinari had sent him. He didn’t look like one of Vetinari’s clerks, one of those ones who would absolutely deny being sent to perform an audit and was, thusly, absolutely a clerk sent to perform an audit.

“Isn’t usury loan sharking?” asked DiMA, who was very, very good with sums. Uncannily good. He could even calculate compound interest off the top of his tube-crowned head. So he was absolutely one of Vetinari’s clerks sent to perform an audit, even if he didn’t look or act like one. Vetinari was somehow getting even cagier, the blighter.

“No, because ‘loan sharking’ is offensive to the fish people who dwell below the waves,” Frostrip corrected testily.

* * *

Sergeant Fred Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch was what was known as an ancient street monster. He’d tried to retire to a farm in the country, once, and before he could even get to the farm, he’d realized just how many… byproducts farm animals made, and he’d decided that he wanted none of it. He was a lifer. Oh, he’d done time in the regiments, sure, but after that, he’d been in the slog that was the Night Watch. He’d done traffic duty. He’d been assigned as Custody Officer at the Lemonade Factory, where they trained new Watchmen. He’d been detached over in the Shires. He’d been a Railway Policeman. But here and now, he was ambling with a lantern in hand, in the amicable cool darkness with Corporal Nobbs down the streets of Ankh-Morpork.

“I reckon we ought to check out that new line to Genua. A man hears all sorts of things about Genua. The line’s bound to be shifty,” hazarded Colon.

“I s’pose,” Nobby said pensively, “Only, Shine of the Rainbow doesn’t like it so much when I’m away.”

“Ah. Mrs. Colon’s just the opposite, there,” said Colon, touching the side of his nose. “When are you going to make her Mrs. Nobbs, anyway?”

“Never will,” said Nobby, very seriously, “Goblins don’t abbreviate their names for no one. She’d have to be Mrs. Shine of the Rainbow Nobbs.”

“But how’s she going to fit that on a mailing address?” asked Colon.

Ruffians generally thought twice about tangling with the Watch these days, even plodders like Colon and skivers like Nobbs. However, that involved a ruffian having a first thought, which was necessary to get to that crucial second thought.

A rather large man burst out of an Agatean ceramic shop, to the tinkling of ceramic shards on the floor, and he bellowed to the night sky. His head swung back and forth, and his eyes latched onto the lanterns carried by Colon and Nobbs. He charged.

Nobbs sidled off to the side, but Colon, who had been here before, he felt, managed, in his terror, to put his hands on the man’s shoulders and tumble over him. As Colon was rolling on the street with no stop in sight, the shopkeeper came out and shrilled, “My Agatean ceramics!” She looked at the Watchmen present and muttered, “Okay, Captain Carrot’s not here, so far, so good.” Then she continued in her loud shrill, “What is the Watch doing about it? I pay my taxes!”

The incensed man turned and pawed at the street with his boot, nostrils flaring. He turned on the rolling Colon, grabbed him by the neck, and hefted him up one-handed.

Colon swore he heard a funny musical motif played.

Then there was a loud bang, and the man dropped him, a little bit of blood bubbling up from his lips. He staggered a few steps and fell over. A little glass syringe with shiny brass fittings and a leather wrapped tumbled out of his pocket. Mr. Vimes had told the Watch to look out for those, ranting about some human drug called ‘Psycho’, but this syringe was clearly empty, so Colon reckoned that was already as good as disposed of.

Colon looked around, bewildered, and he saw a receding figure in the distance who had the fashion taste of either Inspector Lewton or Constable Valentine, when he was off duty. Colon wasn’t going to chase him. He brushed himself off and rubbed his neck.

“Cor, he just pointed at him, and he died!” said Nobby, who was already examining the deceased’s boots with a speculative gleam in his eyes. “Some kinda serial killer wizard?”

Colon thought about how much he did not want to write this up. He shook his head. “Nah, I figure he was just an upstanding citizen Assisting the Watch in Their Inquiries.”

“Oh. Right,” said Nobby, winking.

Colon felt like he needed a shower.

The shopkeeper blinked and shuffled uncertainly. “That was… fast?”

Colon smiled, “Just the sort of service your Watch gives you, ma’am.” He tipped his helm in a fashion he thought was jaunty but really just made him look like he’d dressed himself in the dark.

Nobby had the deceased’s boots off, and he said, “Right then. We’ll be on our way.”

* * *

_DiMA & Taxes - Day 6: Mr. Slant_

“Why is Lord Vetinari punishing you?” asked Mr. Slant. Occasionally, law students or young lawyers who had offended Lord Vetinari in some sense would be directed to Slant. This was the first time Vetinari had sent him someone with no connection to the legal profession, not even in a criminal sense, so whatever he’d done, it must have been egregious. That, or Vetinari was playing silly buggers to keep Slant off balance. One could never tell.

“I think, if I knew, that it would be inadvisable to tell you,” said DiMA thoughtfully. 

Slant’s lips creaked in a fractional smile, devoid of any mirth. Oh yes, he was starting to see what DiMA must have done. “How is your handwriting?”

DiMA blinked. “How would you like it to be?”

Slant showed him a sample of a flowing copperplate cursive. Then he watched as DiMA replicated it. His handwriting was regular. Very, very regular. Almost more like a typeset cursive font. Slant said, “Acceptable. Take notes.”

Perhaps Vetinari was trying to inconvenience Slant for the day, but he could always use a free note-taker.

Most of what Slant was doing this morning was tax law. He went through Lord Downey’s filings first. Downey’s commissions this year included the inhumation of a priest, which was always considered tax-exempt...

Lord Selachii was claiming a $50 deduction for donating a dead deer, which his carriage had run over in the country, to the poor. The deer wasn’t in edible shape by the time it had been donated, but that didn’t matter.47

Coalface, who was currently in the Tanty on charges of possession of large amounts of Honk,48 was going to be able to deduct a significant amount of his back taxes owed as business costs incurred by running his business from his home.

Rich and affluent citizens paid Slant a great deal to ensure that they paid nothing at all to the government of Ankh-Morpork.

Slant tolerated two partners, both vampires, and collectively, they made up Morecombe, Slant and Honeyplace. Morecombe, being a vampire, took a regular daily lunch break to have his joyless black pudding. He looked in on Slant’s office, black pudding in one hand and a sheaf of paper in the other. Smugly, the vampire said, “Commander Vimes is going to sign this.”

Slant glanced over the sheaf of papers and raised one eyebrow as if it were rising from the grave. “A prenuptial agreement? Really? _Vimes_?”

Vimes didn’t quite exist in reality, Slant thought. The man was prudently paranoid enough, but if he was going to go so far as to propose, he’d never want to plan for contingencies of spousal betrayal. Most people didn’t. Most people were fools. _Existence_ was betrayal; Slant, with the line of stitches all around the circumference of his neck, would know.

Morecombe waved his black pudding dismissively. “He doesn’t know it. I went to Lady Sybil, of course. It was easy to convince her that they ought to have it settled in writing for contingencies such as child custody in the case of death or disappearance of one or more of the parents…”

“Prenuptial agreements are hardly enforceable in court,”49 said Slant coolly, but inwardly, he was jealous. Precedents would be set by the document that Morecombe had in his hand.

“This one will be,” said Morecombe, showing the points of his teeth. It might have been a smile.

Morecombe, that buzzing mosquito, departed with his prize in hand, and Slant returned to his work.

Miss Della, who ran a dance academy on Fringe Alley, was claiming a certain augmentative surgical procedure by the Igorina Clinic on Slippery Back as a business expense.

Clarinet lessons were, of course, a classic deduction, as claimed by Miss Reet.

Justice Stoner was a young judge, formerly a land and property law lawyer, who’d been made a judge because he’d irritated Vetinari. Bribing a public official was a time-honoured deduction, which merely required that one disclose one’s name and the name of the official bribed. The novel thing was that Stoner was claiming that he’d bribed himself to the tune of giving himself 15 pence to buy some takeaway at Curry Gardens.

DiMA had been mostly quiet. Slant almost forgot his shadow-for-a-day was there. At the end of the day, DiMA said carefully, “Thank you, Mr. Slant. And that’s tax law, is it? That’s all legal?”

DiMA did have nice handwriting. So Slant indulged him and said, “Yes. Lord Vetinari sent you here to teach you a lesson, didn’t he? The ultimate lesson, in taxes or anything else, is that legal is a commodity you can buy.”

47 [Unusual and borderline pointless tax breaks](https://www.efile.com/legitimate-tax-breaks-and-unusual-extraordinary-qualified-tax-deductions-and-tax-exemptions/) are by no means limited to the Disc, of course.

48 [One of the rare Troll drugs whose name doesn’t begin with ‘s’.](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Honk)

49 [A feature that United Kingdom law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement#United_Kingdom) once had in common with Ankh-Morpork law.

* * *

DiMA went to the execution and watched Tektus hang, or rather, watched a _forgery_ who thought he was Tektus, cobbled together from DiMA’s worst memories of Tektus, not his best ones. He felt obligated. He was the reason why that body could walk at all, why it could put together two words to curse Commander Vimes as an infidel with his dying breath. (DiMA did not know, but Commander Vimes had already been cursed by someone else’s dying breath, and that curse was rather possessive. Nothing else would be setting up shop in its territory.)

DiMA also watched the crowd. People brought their children along. It was a family affair. Vendors sold memorabilia. C.M.O.T. Dibbler was there, selling what he purported were iguana bits on a stick. DiMA was glad of precisely one thing: that he did not eat.

Then he went back to the University, and he picked up a pile of papers and graded them even more mechanically than he usually did, thinking, but not thinking. The execution had been bright in the morning, the rising sun making a halo around what had been Tektus. A glow. In the afternoon, a bledlow came for DiMA, and the bledlow gave him to a Watchman, and the Watchman took him to the Palace.

DiMA bowed before the Patrician, who greeted him, “Mr. DiMA. Someone who is actually prompt upon summons. A pleasant change.”

DiMA wondered if he could just continue the bow forward, fall over, and curl up on the floor. That was probably inappropriate, he decided. The Patrician terrified him, and what made it worse was that the Patrician had picked out some of the worst qualities about DiMA to be interested in. The Patrician was, by himself, a person to fear, but what DiMA feared more was what the Patrician might talk him into doing next. 

The Patrician continued, “Your part seems to have worked, you may be pleased to know.”

“Pleased? No, your lordship. I was concerned, though, about the partitioning.” DiMA grimaced. “It was a tricky business.” A human brain wasn’t designed for anything. It was a cobbled-together kludge that kept itself running by constantly lying to itself. A human brain was especially not designed to run a partitioned operating system and dump half its contents upon a predetermined trigger, but DiMA had made it do so, convincing the brain to accept that complicated sort of lie. DiMA _was_ a fraud, wasn’t he? A sick, disgusting monster.

“I am told that you can forget specific memories at will. You may wish to consider it,” the Patrician suggested.

DiMA had considered it. Whenever he started really thinking, it was all he thought about, and he needed to not be thinking about it, because he had other things he needed to be considering. Nick had asked DiMA to be his best man! And DiMA knew he was neither best nor a man, and he wasn’t even sure yet what all it involved, but he had to write a speech, and there were the never-ending piles of papers, and the run logs from Hex’s attempts at moving a paintball in Z-dimensional space, and his homework and Chatur’s homework…

“No, your lordship. I ran a projection, and at some point, Nick or Commander Vimes will ask me about this matter, and if I forget what I have done and reply to one of them with ‘Tektus who?’ they will assume the _very_ worst of me, which is… fair. Instead, I will remember and simply tell them that I have nothing to tell them that is not a lie, your lordship,” said DiMA, and he did not say that he would also remember because maybe if he remembered how absolutely awful this made him feel, just maybe he would stop doing things like this. He finished, depressed, “They will also assume the worst of me in that case, but at least I will know why they are assuming the worst of me, and I will not attempt to go prying into what I have done, your lordship.”

“As long as you have nothing to say, I suppose it does not matter why you do not say it,” mused the Patrician. “Of course, if you did say something, you might soon find yourself voiceless. Now, as you have done a service to the city of Ankh-Morpork, a reward may be in order, Mr. DiMA. What would you like?”

DiMA stared at a spot on the floor of the Oblong Office somewhat in front of the Patrician. Eventually, he said, “Thank you, your lordship, for assuming that I have desires.”

DiMA didn’t know what he wanted. If Nick wasn’t around, he probably would have gone and found a cave and stared at the wall and, after all this, cried dry-eyed tears. As it was, Nick was around, and Nick wanted DiMA to be best man at his wedding, and Ponder seemed fine with DiMA lurking in his laboratory as long as DiMA kept grading papers and Ponder’s graduate students were nice enough and some of the undergraduates would drag DiMA along on ‘adventures’ when they wanted a sober companion and none of the Faculty had actually thrown DiMA out of a classroom when he’d attended, even if they sometimes sniffed disdainfully about DiMA being a ‘foreigner’ and so… and so… he kept going. But what did he _want_? DiMA had no idea. Some people puttered around at University, trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. DiMA was having a hell of a time of it.

“You are aware, Mr. DiMA, that a grader, even a grader grading for eighteen classes - you are an industrious sort, are you not? - cannot afford tuition for a full course load at Unseen University? And I see that you have applied for and been rejected from a number of scholarships. Not the eighth son of an eighth son, didn’t inherit a staff, and you’re entirely too intelligent for the Archchancellor’s ‘take them in dumb; turn them out smart’ policy. Your only family is Nick Valentine, and a Constable's salary would be no help with regards to your tuition woes," observed the Patrician. 

Even an Unseen University shut in knew that the Patrician had multiple spy networks, some of which were at odds with each other. The University house staff, who had access to the records, were certainly bribeable. DiMA admitted sadly, "I am aware, your lordship."

He could maybe afford an actual course for credit every other semester. Otherwise, DiMA simply showed up and audited classes, which cost him nothing. 

"At times, a noble family will sponsor a wizarding student with a certain understanding in mind when that student graduates. You will understand, Mr. DiMA, that I have no interest in a court wizard, but I will sponsor your tuition," said the Patrician. 

DiMA was not, it had been observed, a wizard, but like many wizards, he had no particular faith in gods. The gods existed, certainly, but he saw no reason to worship them. There could be no god for synths. Now, however, DiMA felt particularly forsaken. He felt as if he had stepped before a firing squad and was being asked to hand his plasma pistol over so that it might be used for the killing blow and that he was expected to be thankful for the courtesy being done to him. He said politely, "My sincerest thanks, your lordship. You are truly a generous Tyrant. As a humble synth, I would not dream of inconveniencing you in such a fashion. I will manage on my own somehow."

"Oh no, Mr. DiMA. I will not be the one inconvenienced. I insist," said the Patrician, a hint of steel to his voice, like there was a hint of steel about his Death's Head cane. 

There was no sane way of preventing the Patrician from paying for his tuition if the Patrician was determined to do so. DiMA murmured weakly, "Your charity knows no bounds. I am in your debt, your lordship," _which is where you want me to be and why I don't want to be there,_ "Should I also understand that you may, at times, prevail upon me for certain extracurriculars?"

"I imagine you will have more free time if you are not doing quite so much grading," the Patrician said circumspectly. “Now, are you aware that the Krull College of Wizards turns out female graduates?”

“It is generally held to be baseless slander upon the country of Krull, your lordship,” said DiMA, which was what everyone always said whenever someone brought up the concept of female wizards in Krull. DiMA didn’t actually see the problem, and he was fairly sure that some of those beards in Unseen University were fake. Some of those fake beards might belong to trans men, but some of them… well, it wasn’t any of his business.

“Baseless slander. Hm. I’m sure,” said the Patrician, in the tone of someone who was certain of the opposite. “You are dismissed, Mr. DiMA.”

* * *

In between poking at dissembling the Vessel, grading, and what the Patrician had asked of him, DiMA prowled through the depths of the library, unreeling a spool of bailing wire as he went. The Unseen University had many dangerous books, for many different definitions of dangerous. They were deliberately difficult to find. Some were chained, kept on ice, or under lead. Eventually, DiMA found the book. He was nothing if not efficient at search functions, especially now that he had his memory cleared out. DiMA stood there and read the book cover to cover, taking note of the spine. Then he put it back. 

DiMA checked out a book on book-making, the Librarian giving his card only a cursory check. The Librarian didn’t like it when patrons read the books, but DiMA always returned his on time, and he didn’t dogear the pages or crease the spines. Then he gathered up supplies and settled down to make a copy of the book he’d read earlier with one tiny change.

Wathen knew a fair selection of particularly nasty and subtle spells, and he had access to high valences of magic, giving his spells a wicked punch, but DiMA had concluded that Wathen wasn’t a particularly good wizard in the sense of capability. It came down to the fact that when Wathen looked at Xian, Zinon, Chatur, and DiMA, and he saw all of them, human men and synth, as alike, as equally foreign and equally acceptable targets of mistreatment.

A wizard needed to see reality to see magic. Wathen, who couldn’t tell DiMA and Zinon apart, was seeing what he wanted. He made targeting errors. He was sloppy with his syntax.

DiMA did something that would have scandalized the Librarian. He took the book he’d just made out in the street and scraped it around. _He creased the spine._ He dogeared the pages. DiMA put a piece of bacon in as a bookmark and tested it. Yes, the book always opened exactly to one specific page. 

Then he stalked the hallways where Wathen was usually found. The wizard had been scarce, but nothing formal had happened to him, and as DiMA understood the university statues, nothing formal would. In any case, Wathen would eventually come out for food. He was only human. DiMA had time, now.

Alf, Chatur, Zinon, and Xian were all rather miffed at DiMA. They’d fail their class, they said. He supposed he could understand the frustration, but insofar as Zinon and Xian had been near death, dying would have also led to them failing not only _all_ of their classes but existence in general. DiMA should have done something sooner, before it had all gone so poorly. He regretted his inaction.

Eventually, DiMA ran across Wathen, who looked at the empty hallway and DiMA clutching a grimoire, and he saw a victim. Wathen pulled the tome out of DiMA’s hands, and it fell open to exactly that one page. A nasty smile lit on his face, and he commented, “Zinon, you’ve been extremely naughty, haven’t you?” His finger traced over the runes and diagram on the page. “This is a spell for absolute mental control of a person. You really ought to grovel now.”

“You shouldn’t use that spell,” DiMA said, voice steady.

“Piss-poor grovelling, that,” said Wathen, shaking his head.

DiMA _had_ warned him.

Wathen cast the spell, just as it was written.

A more careful wizard would have noticed the syntax error. It wasn’t absolute control of _a_ mind with a variable target. It was absolute control of a mind with the _self_ pre-selected as target.

DiMA watched as Wathen abruptly scrambled to attempt conscious control of every automatic function that a brain usually ran for a human body, as he had to will his heart to beat, remind his blood vessels to dilate and constrict as different organs demanded more and less blood for their daily operation, explicitly direct his muscles to relax and contract. Wathen lasted half a second before he fell over. DiMA reached over and took the grimoire from Wathen’s hands and stowed it in his inventory.

Then he walked away.

* * *

Kai Wathen took a moment, staring at the skeletally gaunt man in the black robe with the blue eyes like dying stars, to truly see what he was, but death stripped away all illusions, especially the comforting ones. It shouldn’t have taken that long; a wizard should have known Death when he saw him, but Wathen was a Bad Wizard, and he was a bad wizard. He’d let his sight lapse. He hadn’t been seeing things as they were.

“That wasn’t fair, though,” said Kai Wathen, frowning. He’d lived through dead men’s boots. Wathen had killed his share of his fellow wizards. He’d been very good at making his victims think it had been their own ideas. But Ridcully had blustered in, all shouting, and dead men’s boots had died its own death. Still, Wathen couldn’t say he was surprised to find another wizard had done for him, it was just -

“He’s foreign, you know,” Wathen sniffed.

YOU’RE FROM LLAMEDOS, observed Death.

That conniving student had long since left the hallway, and Wathen had been a few minutes in dying, alone and untended on the floor. But Wathen thought about Deimos… no, that was wrong. He’d never cared to remember that rascal’s name. It hadn’t seemed important, and now the boy had gone and killed him. Well, tricked him into killing himself. Wathen wasn’t even sure who had engineered his demise.

“Yes. Well,” Wathen sulked. His shade skulked around just a bit. “I should like to know that wastrel’s name, before I go. You know, so that if I should reincarnate as a tree, I might dump all my leaves on him as he walks by…”

He ghosted through walls, back to where that group of good-for-nothing excuses for students tended to gather.

All the comforting illusions had been stripped away.

What he was looking at was neatly filling out some paperwork and signed its - his name ‘DiMA’. He wasn’t human. DiMA wasn’t even human, and he had done for Kai Wathen.

Ego in tatters, Wathen sat down on the black sands, staring at nothing at all. 

DiMA looked over at Death, and he even looked ready to make a pleasant greeting. Death tapped Wathen on the shoulder. YOU SHOULD GO NOW.

Yes. Coming back as a tree, something that couldn’t think at all and certainly couldn’t feel embarrassed, sounded just dandy.

* * *

Valentine heard that Crogan, the Assassin who’d tried to inhume him, had been bitten by the religious bug, converted to Omnianism, become a missionary, and was now putting his Assassin skills to work reverse pickpocketing religious pamphlets into the pockets of the unwary passersby. This resolution was one that caused a great deal of complaint, but Valentine merely smiled. It was a beautiful thing when a man got in touch with his inner spirituality, even if his inner spirituality kept getting all over the inner pockets of other people.

Valentine was off duty at a smoky jazz bar that had let him in because he’d come with a human companion. He was catching up with Deacon when he noticed the dame dropping something in his Isle of Gods iced tea just a fraction before Deacon did. Valentine caught her wrist and said, aggressively friendly, “Miss, I think you lost something of yours in my drink.”

Her reply was an attempt to punch a wrist dagger into his face, which led to him grabbing her other wrist, at which point she became of aware of what Valentine already knew: that Deacon had drawn a crossbow, which was sighted at her head.

“Now, that’s not sporting,” she protested.

Valentine disarmed her and handcuffed her down to a chair.

“I don’t think poisoning your bait is sporting, either, but what do I know?” said Deacon, and he held the crossbow one-handed, finger on the trigger, and picked up Nick’s drink and sniffed it. “Mmm. Bitter almonds. I love the scent of cyanide in the night. Why don’t you try it as a perfume?”

She had a lean build and was dressed all in black, the classy kind of black that cost extra, and that was why, instead of going straight to an off-duty arrest, Valentine pulled out her pocketbook, where he found a distinctive black badge. “Miss Irene Cropper, Guild Assassin. I should, ah, maybe not tell you, this, but…” Valentine picked up his drink and downed it, cyanide and all, “...you know I ain’t human, right?”

“Oh dear, but I did _so well_ on the Guild physiology and pharmacology exams,” Cropper protested. “I had hoped that you might be vulnerable to gold cyanidation. Some trolls are.”

“Might want to stick to humans,” Valentine snapped, irritably, “or maybe no one at all.”

“I know it’s strange to think about, but it’s actually possible to make a living in this town without killing anyone,” said Deacon.

“It’s not like I asked to be an Assassin! I’m the third daughter, and my parents wanted me to stay closer in town rather than sending me off to the Quirm College,” Cropper said petulantly.

“You still took a cool $1000 to kill me,” Valentine observed, looking through her pocketbook and the little envelope inside. One of the c-note imps made a face at him.

“It’s an honourable trade,” insisted Cropper.

“So’s working for Harry King,” said Deacon.

If the look that Cropper shot could kill, she would have been in trouble with the Assassins’ Guild for the death of a bystander.

“You sound like a booksmart kid, even if you’re book dumb, too. Gotta be other things you could do with that education,” Valentine speculated.

The singer hadn’t even paused in her litany of how someone had done her wrong. Performers got used to patrons holding each other up, or they didn’t last long in show biz.

“I bet you could even help people,” Valentine said, taking a stab in the dark, rather than a stab in a smoky jazz joint, as had been recently directed at him.

“They do say Dr. Lawn has been training women as doctors...” she said, speculatively. She brightened. “I know a great deal of human anatomy.”

“Uh… huh,” said Valentine, who found the fashionable scarf that seemed reinforced enough to be a garrotte and used it to bind her hands to the chair. He reclaimed his handcuffs and laid his payment and tip down on the bar.

Deacon did the same, they headed out and down, to the sewers that Deacon found more comfortable. After some time walking, Deacon said, “I like you, y’know, but that shouldn’t have worked.”

Valentine shrugged. “But it worked. It all works. That’s the thing about this city.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** It's a weird quirk of Discworld that Ankh-Morpork wizards can skirt out of most civil law and that they answer instead to the Lore. It means that if a wizard does something bad, instead of a civil trial, the Archchancellor's Court just turns a blind eye when said wizard's enemies decide to wreak their own vengeance. This is not actually great, from the perspective of a culture of justice.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	19. Matriculation * [Valentine Disliked That] * The Butler Did It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter song.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Matriculation * [Valentine Disliked That] * The Butler Did It_

DiMA was at the Mended Drum with Alf, Chatur, Xian, and Zinon, ostensibly to celebrate his matriculation as a student wizard. They had finally forgiven him, just in time. So they’d failed one of their independent study courses and had been rather sore about that. Zinon had forgiven DiMA first; he’d been near to death from lack of sleep, anyway, and once he’d recovered, he’d begrudgingly acknowledged that if DiMA hadn’t brought the Archchancellor around, well… Xian was still cranky and low-level angry, but as far as DiMA could tell, that was Xian’s default state of existence. Alf had been upset a long time, because he’d already dealt with the sleeping curse on his own, but he didn’t want to see, up close and personal, what happened if someone set off a nuke under a thaumic reactor. In the end, they all agreed it was for the best that the icono-game had been shut down. 

Despite how some students felt about it, failing a class was not the end of the world. However, in this particular case, passing it might have been. 

Besides, the slood lab was a lot more fun.

Then Chatur had shown back up, a few days before DiMA’s matriculation ceremony. He had been rather bewildered that he’d only failed _one_ of the independent study courses that he’d been taking in between terms. Who in the blazes had done all of Chatur’s homework for the other independent studies he was in? 

Well, whoever it was, he’d gotten into Chatur’s mindset enough that he’d even left Chatur’s name off some of the worksheets. Chatur kept forgetting to sign his name before he handed his work in.

Now, the presentation of a staff to a student wizard was supposed to be a very impressive ceremony. There was a long and theoretically frightening ordeal involving masks and hoods and swords and fearful oaths about people’s tongues being cut out and their entrails torn by wild birds and their ashes scattered to the eight winds and so on. 

The effect had been rather spoiled because…

“When you went through it, did Mister Stibbons editorialize the whole time about how you could do the ceremony in a quarter the time and you don’t even need the masks?” asked DiMA. He finally had on proper fireproof white laboratory robes and a rather heavily modified white pointy hat. DiMA had a cup of coffee, his reluctant concession to social drinking. It was terrible. Patrons didn’t go to the Mended Drum for coffee. Granted, he didn’t think the drinks his colleagues were imbibing were any better. They were just bad in entirely different dimensions.

“Hah! Yes,” admitted Chatur.

“Metal staff,” Alf sniffed, looking skeptically at DiMA’s staff, “they keep cropping up as faddish, but you just can’t beat good, hard wood.”

Zinon gave Alf a strange look.

“Metal’s not bad if you can get octiron,” said Xian smugly.

DiMA’s staff was not octiron, which was hideously expensive in Ankh-Morpork. It looked more or less like a narrower, rescaled Fog Condenser, and insofar as wizard’s staffs were designed to condense magic out of the air for storage and later use, it functioned on the same principle as a Fog Condenser would. DiMA steepled his hands. “You have to consider the aesthetic. Appearances are of significant importance to a wizard. A wooden staff would clash with a synthetic wizard. Onlookers would think that I had stolen someone else’s staff or, worse, that I was faking entirely. As a mechanical wizard with a mechanical staff, I may not look like the expected mental prototype for a wizard, but I at least present a cohesive whole.”

“Oh. Point,” admitted Zinon, which was a sign he’d had too many drinks already. He was an agreeable drunk.

“But you made it yourself, and it works?” said Chatur. “I mean, I just bought a dwarf-made one.”

DiMA knew, in his struts, that he could have done magic with a stick. Because he had. He said softly, “Of course it works.”

“And I hear Wathen died? Gods, sod that guy,” said Chatur, knocking back his drink and flagging down the bartender for another.

“Oh yeah, clean up crew found him down in a hallway. All his spells had gone off,” said Xian, smiling wickedly.

A wizard’s memorized spells said themselves when he died. 

“I hear he had half a dozen different love spells loaded up, too. How pathetic. They say the ceiling boards were trying to make it with the floor tiles for a day afterward!” snickered Alf.

“Stroke?” Chatur asked.

“No, no, he definitely made a syntax error on a spell. That’s what I heard,” said Zinon.

“No way. Too many wizards wanted that prick dead. Someone sent him up,” Xian insisted, “and good riddance, too.”

“Yeah? So why’s no one taken credit? That’s bragging rights, it is. Wathen was a fourth level wizard! That’s a spare office open, too,” said Alf. Alf, Chatur, Xian, and Zinon were, charitably, first level wizards, insofar as they had finished their undergraduate studies and moved onto graduate studies.

“It’s not dead men’s boots, anymore. We’re civilized,” said Zinon, airily.

“Sod that, I’d move straight up to fourth level and my own office, if I could,” said Chatur. “No, must have just been a syntax error, then.”

* * *

Matthew Alphaeusson was a government clerk. His work was not so wet as a Dark Clerk. No, his work was very, very dry. He was a tax clerk. About a week prior, he’d woken up with an extremely sore neck and a terrible sunburn all over his body, despite the icky grey winter weather, and his co-workers had told him that a very heavy stack of paperwork had fallen on his head and he might feel out of sorts. So Alphaeusson didn’t believe them when they said that, even if he did also have papercuts in terribly inconvenient places, but he didn’t let them know that he didn’t believe them. 

He settled back into his work. Alphaeusson enjoyed it; took pride in what he did, and he could tabulate compound interest off the top of his head. He quickly realized, though, that while he could find any error in the ledgers that he went through, that they only did anything about certain errors.

“Maybe you’d forgotten, what with that knock to the noggin?” his supervisor said acidly.

Tax avoidance and tax evasion were both rampant problems in Ankh-Morpork, a city of wealthy people with a government that struggled with solvency. However, a court trial for tax evasion was costly to the city, and the rich, Guilds, and corporations could all afford much better lawyers than the city could. 

So maybe Lady Regina Rust wasn’t reporting her earnings on the scuttled _Aftermath_ icono-game appropriately, but there wasn’t anything to do about her. She’d hire a lawyer like Honeyplace, and the city would be drained bloodless in court fees.

But Mr. Anvilfoot, the recent widower of Constable Anvilfoot, who, Alphaeusson suspected, had only made a mistake on his taxes because he wasn’t used to being a widower? Oh, some boys could be sent around to him. Little people - not that anyone called dwarfs little people to their bearded faces - didn’t take the city to court.

And what did they even do with gargoyles, who were paid in pigeons and had no use for paper and metal money?50

It upset Alphaeusson, when he saw the same story happening, ledger after ledger, and those were only the records that he had access to. Some citizens didn’t even report their earnings, and to be frank, the city had no idea what their census even was. The Unseen University did have some rather interesting counting machines…

50 [Gargoyles aren’t the only ones who trade in difficult to tax currency.](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/world/europe/07witches.html)

* * *

Susan had been irritated when, months back, she’d read in the paper that Commander Vimes had gotten himself stuck in an icono-game and then had come out with new friends. That was the sort of daft adventure that happened to twee children. She’d seen his new older son, Shaun, in the hallway, and had been annoyed to discover that there was something off about the boy when she really looked at him. Now, apparently, Vimes was making a silly pretense of being engaged to his paramour, and in an even more silly circumstance, his wife appeared to be cheerily going along with it. Lady Sybil had brought him around to the school, to introduce him to the teachers.

Mr. Nick Valentine was even more bothersome to Susan than Shaun was. They were both fictional characters made real, but Valentine was something that was openly and obviously fictional. Shaun could at least pass for a human boy.

“Mr. Valentine might be around to pick up the boys sometime, so I wanted everyone to be familiar with him,” said Lady Sybil.

Susan didn’t want to be familiar with whatever Valentine was. He was some nonsense that put her in mind of tears in the fabric of reality. 

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Susan,” said Valentine, holding out his hand. 

Susan didn’t take it. She said, “I’m sure you are.”

“Young Sam comes back with some wild stories about your class,” said Valentine.

“I’m sure he does,” she agreed. Susan didn’t have to entirely exist within time or space if she didn’t want to, which was useful for class history field trips.

Lady Sybil said brightly, “So you’ll be able to recognize Mr. Valentine now.”

Susan narrowed her eyes. “Yes. Easy to spot. He wears an old hat and trenchcoat getup.”

* * *

Wedding plans bounced through Valentine’s mind. He stopped by the Unseen University to check on how DiMA was doing, as Valentine sometimes did and thought that he ought to do more often, especially as DiMA was going to be his best man. Valentine noted that DiMA was wearing a plain white robe, which had been heavily slit, with ribbon ties added, so that it could drape over his odd frame, with midnight trim at the hem, and a hat with a brim like a backwards crescent moon, with about two thirds of a cone on top, open in the back. The hat was, Nick was forced to acknowledge, what a wizard hat would have been if such a hat had been cruelly forced to accommodate DiMA’s head. DiMA sat next to Hex, absently grading a stack of papers. The white was the same white that the graduate student wizards wore. Nick’s optics brightened, and he looked around to see if anyone was there who could have seen DiMA, and he sputtered, “You can’t wear that!”

DiMA neatly marked ‘plagiarism, but also the wrong answer’ on the page he was examining in red ink with a quill pen. He gave Valentine a blank look. There was a large sand table near him similar to one that Valentine had seen when a monk had gone missing, because people could be frankly terrible in their xenophobia.

Valentine continued, “That - that’s a wizard’s hat. A man can get in serious trouble, pretending to be a wizard.”

“I am not pretending,” DiMA said serenely and flipped the page over, the quill pen striking through several lines and appending to the margin, ‘there is no mathematical base system in which these calculations could ever be correct’.

Valentine crossed his arms, and he looked up at the ceiling. Exasperated, he said, “You’re not a wizard,” and he wanted to add ‘you’re a weird synth who spends all his time with the first mainframe on the Disc’, but that seemed more uncharitable than was necessary.

“I am a graduate student and formally considered to be an apprentice of Mister Ponder Stibbons, although he’s more of an academic advisor who is supposed to be checking that I am on track for graduation,” said DiMA 

Nick squinted. “You can’t possibly be serious.” Was DiMA kidding him? Nick didn’t think his brother had it in him. 

DiMA held out his hand, looking over at the far corner of the room, where what looked like a small, short, skinny Fog Condenser, no taller than 6 feet, was leaning. He made a gesture, and the staff was suddenly in his hand.

“Ferromagnetism,” Nick said flatly, looking at the metal staff.

“An interesting theory. How do you propose that I induced ferromagnetism in _titanium_?” asked DiMA.

Valentine frowned. “Where’d you _get_ titanium?”

“I scavenged it out of the Nucleus. A little piece of a home I never knew. I’ve been working on decommissioning it, remember?” said DiMA.

“Oh. Uh. Good,” said Valentine, rubbing the back of his head. Having a decrepit nuclear submarine underneath Unseen University did seem like a horrible idea, and DiMA was on the short list of people in Ankh-Morpork who were remotely qualified to decommission a nuclear submarine. “So, I just wanted to go over a few things with you before the wedding rehearsal…”

* * *

Valentine believed Vimes when Vimes said that he had ordered Willikins to destroy the launch key. However, it also meant that Valentine knew that Vimes had a secret locked vault in his cellar. Vimes had to understand that Valentine was going to trust but verify. Besides, Sam had gone through Nick’s personal items in the Commonwealth. Turning the tables was fair play. Vimes had to understand this was just how their relationship was going to be.

In a faded blue nightgown, the synth detective ghosted through the Ramkins' mansion, hoping Willikins was asleep. The butler was always sharpening knives or slicing bananas or stringing out tripwires whenever Valentine was around. It wasn’t just that the bedroom hadn’t been cleaned and the mattress hadn’t been replaced until Codsworth went and did it. It wasn’t just that there was never a chair or a cup of sherry at the table for Valentine unless Codsworth put them there. It wasn’t how his laundry ended up ‘misplaced’ all the time. It also wasn’t just the time that Willikins, who was not an ungraceful man, knocked Valentine right into one of Vimes’s drop-down cages with a not-at-all-embarrassed _whoops_.

It was all of those things.

The cellar wasn’t hard to find. The dirt-disguised seam in the concrete floor was a little harder to find, but for Valentine, not much. With the help of a crowbar, he levered the slab out. There was a vault. Valentine unrolled the velvet roll of lockpicks that Vimes had gifted him, and he set to work opening the lock.

Inside was a tiny lump of melted slag and a small, foldable crossbow, which could be easily concealed within a pocket, with a small supply of bolts. Valentine examined the crossbow. It was of excellent quality, easily the same quality as Vimes’s own personal crossbow, and he thought it was probably Burleigh & Stronginthearm-make. Walking a beat in Ankh-Morpork had taught Valentine all about crossbows. He couldn’t say what model this one was, though, if it had a model name, if it wasn’t a custom job, but he could tell one thing for certain: it had to be illegal.

Why did Valentine always uncover unpleasant things about the people he cared about when he went rooting around in basements?

Spring-gonnes51, pocket-sized one-shot crossbows without the cross, were illegal on the grounds that they were purely assassination weapons. To listen to the Commander of the Watch, weapons were for having. For being seen. For warning. So one didn't have to kill people. Picking up the crossbow from the vault and sighting along it, Valentine thought it was a good deal more dangerous than a spring-gonne. He’d never handled a spring-gonne, had only seen diagrams of them, but it didn’t look like it would be accurate anywhere past short range, and this little devil looked like it could fire true even at distance. It also seemed like it would be easier and quicker to reload than a spring-gonne.

The string and cables of the crossbow in his hand had been recently waxed. The rails, trigger box, and mounting bolts were lubricated. The centre of the bowstring showed mild signs of wear, though no separation or signs of breakage. There was no dirt or dust on it. The scope lense was clean. All the bolts were tight.52

Someone was looking after this little devil. Valentine didn't personally object to concealed ranged weapons the way that Vimes did. Something in his makeup was American, and the foldable crossbow wasn’t a notch on a gun, let alone a laser. However, he did very much object to uneven application of the law.

51 [Spring-gonnes,](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Spring-gonne) also called “one shots” because if you miss with the first shot, you won’t get another.

52 [Crossbow maintenance](http://www.bestcrossbowsource.com/crossbow-maintenance-taking-care-of-your-weapon/) is, of course, very important.

* * *

Vimes was sleeping, facedown and in the altogether, as he usually did, when a familiar metal hand gently tapped him on the shoulder. A voice he knew well asked, “Doll? Could I wake you up for a little bit?”

“Gneh?” said Vimes fuzzily, as he sat up and groped over for the nightstand next to the bed. He picked his Pip-Boy off the nightstand and looked at the time. Then he asked, “Do I need to get dressed?”

“Depends,” said Valentine. “So, how would I go about reporting a violation of the Concealed Weapons Act of 1986?”

Vimes frowned. “A spring-gonne? In my city? Confiscate the weapon, if possible, and arrest the possessor, but if the possessor still has the weapon, I would make sure that you have at least three other Watchmen with you.” He looked over at his dressing room. “Just one moment, and I’ll help you with it -”

“Sure. You can help me,” Valentine said. He slowly and with no sudden moves, pulled a small foldable crossbow out of the pocket of his nightgown and set it down between them on the bed. “You can give me a statement on why you had this in your cellar.”

Vimes looked at the foldable crossbow and sucked in a breath. He said slowly, “This is a Piecemaker Mark IX. Only three of them were made, because it was judged that it does, indeed, fall under the Concealed Weapons Act of 1986. Two are under wizard-lock at the Burleigh & Stronginthearm company vaults. I – I was going to destroy this one…”

Why hadn’t he?

Why didn’t Dr. Cruces destroy the gonne?

“This little baby’s been maintained and _used_ ,” observed Valentine. He slid a metal finger along the silent bowstring, feeling the wear.

Vimes was quiet.

“Do you know anything about that?” Valentine prodded. When answers weren’t forthcoming, he added, “When it comes to people who know where that vault is, there’s you, there’s the Cult of Atom - and the members who haven’t been executed already are in lockup in the Tanty and can’t remember a thing about it - there’s that damn elf, there’s me, and there’s Willikins. So what is it, Sam? You gonna tell me an elf’s breaking in and using your contraband crossbow?”

“It hasn’t been used inside Ankh-Morpork city limits,” said Vimes, although he felt some slight uncertainty. He was all but sure that Willikins had used it in the Shires, although he’d stopped shy of confirmation, granting Willikins that plausible deniability. There was also the issue that the Shires were somewhat questionably Ankh-Morpork jurisdiction, after all.

“Oh, so foreigners don’t deserve the same safety that Ankh-Morporkians do?” snapped Valentine.

He hadn’t meant that, not at all, but the actions spoke for themselves, didn’t they? Vimes picked up the crossbow and then dropped it, as if scalded. He murmured, as if to himself, “Why didn’t I destroy it?”

It was nothing more than a killing weapon, deadly in the hands of a skilled man.

_Like me._

“I’m disappointed in you, harping on about how you won’t have concealed crossbows in your city and then ignoring the law to have one yourself,” Valentine said, sourly. “What happened to treating everyone equally?”

Vimes rubbed his wrist, where the livid mark of the Summoning Dark remained. It had made so much sense at the time, and he’d felt _entitled_ …

“Besides, this makes you suspect one if this thing’s ever used in a crime,” Valentine continued.

“Oh,” said Vimes, a few pieces clicking belatedly into place. Yes, he would be suspect one, wouldn’t he? And just _having_ the Piecemaker Mark IX was a hanging offense.

But why had he kept it? His wrist itched. Vimes didn’t need a murderer’s weapon.

_But there are always victims who cry for vengeance._

Like the guard with the slit throat, after the murderer Stratford had escaped from the prisoner transport wagon. Stratford had been found dead, shortly thereafter. Vimes had resolved to never ask Willikins about that. Looking at the crossbow, Vimes thought about all the things he didn’t ask Willikins about.

_Stratford deserved it._

Vimes corrected himself, _No, Stratford’s victims deserved justice._

Corrected himself? Vimes murmured weakly, “I’ve been played.”

There was his own darkness. It had always been there. Sometimes he’d called it the Beast. Then there was the Summoning Dark, one of the scars that Koom Valley had left on him, a quasi-demon, a complicated thought about vengeance looking for the correct sort of mind to think it. Sometimes, it was quiet, and he thought it had left him. Sometimes, he wondered how he would know if it was gone.

But the launch key, that symbol of vengeance denied. The Piecemaker Mark IX, the murderer’s weapon. No man was entitled to such a weapon, just as no man was entitled to another man’s life. How much of it was him? How much of it was the Summoning Dark? How could Vimes tell the difference?

It didn’t matter. He offered, “Let’s go find Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth VI,” Sybil’s hottest dragon that year, “and destroy it, shall we?”

“I should arrest you,” Valentine said, disapproval writ on the lines of his face.

Vimes winced. “You should.”

_Why hadn’t he destroyed it!?_

“There shouldn’t be one law for some and a different law for everyone else,” continued Valentine.

“Absolutely,” Vimes mumbled. Terror settled over him like horizontal rain soaking under his oil cloak.

“I’m pretty sure there’d be an actual investigation, if I did arrest you. It might even go to trial. If it did, you’d have Morecombe as your lawyer, and it’d stop here, I think.” Valentine paused and shook himself. “Unless the Patrician wanted it to go somewhere. And then you’d hang. Seems like he hasn’t been too happy with you over me, and, well… Now you’ll have to excuse me over being a fictional American, but I think hanging a guy over a crossbow is stupid, and I can’t have that on my hands.”

Vimes frowned. “You just said you can’t have one law for some –”

Valentine looked sidelong, clear distaste on his face. “Yeah, and I think this is a law we should have for _none_. Maybe remember that, next time it comes up.”

Vimes stared stupidly at Valentine.

The synth continued. “C’mon, your Watchmen ignore stupid laws all the time. Hell, they even ignore your orders if they really have to.”

“I was always proud of that,” Vimes said faintly.

“And I… think the original Nick Valentine must have ignored stuff he saw other officers do. Couldn’t have made Detective without turning a blind eye, here and there.” Valentine’s lips curled with disgust again.

“He wasn’t real,” Vimes started to remind.

“No, but I’m built on those ideas, and maybe I don’t like what that says about my inclinations, but,” Valentine shrugged. He waved the Piecemaker Mark IX airily. “I don’t like that you have this. I don’t see what good arresting you over it is gonna do. Either it’s a waste of time or a waste of _you_ , sweetheart. So we’ll go destroy it. Don’t give me a reason to be disappointed in you like this again, and maybe I won’t disappoint myself again, too.”

Vimes stared at the wall for a while, trembling. He’d never needed an evil little weapon like that. Only a sense of entitlement had convinced him otherwise. Vimes needed to be more careful; he could become someone he didn’t like at all too easily, without ever knowing it.

He threw on a nightgown, and they went out, gave Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth VI a lump of anthracite coal for being a good boy, and destroyed the crossbow by dragon flame and silvery moonlight. Vimes wondered when Willikins would find that the Piecemaker Mark IX was gone. Willikins wouldn’t say anything, he was sure. Vimes wondered if _he_ should say something.

Valentine slipped his arm around Vimes’s hip as the embers smouldered and died, and Vimes thought a little about how Willikins interacted with Valentine, which mostly amounted to ‘not well’. There had to be more that Vimes wasn’t seeing, that Valentine would never say, but the time that Willikins had knocked Valentine into one of Vimes’s cage-traps was rather egregious. Vimes _knew_ Willikins wasn’t clumsy.

Valentine and Vimes went back to bed. Valentine picked back up the book on his nightstand. While Vimes slept, Nick usually read, unless there was something else he wanted to do in the night, and Vimes did worry about the places Valentine went while Vimes slept. Since they’d resumed their relationship, Vimes hadn’t awoken in the night and seen him kneeling in prayer. Thinking about the Piecemaker Mark IX, Valentine was certainly still concerned about _Vimes_ ’s soul, though.

* * *

Vimes was, he was certain, a man accused of a crime he did not commit, and he had very little time to clear his name.

Sybil wanted to take Vimes and Valentine to a soirée with some of her society friends to introduce Valentine to them. Vimes felt about this the way he usually did about Sybil’s society do’s, with an added level of anxiety about the fact that he was positive that people would be unkind to Valentine, and then Vimes was sure he’d say something cutting right back if only because he couldn’t resort to actual cutting implements, and then Sybil would narrow her eyes at him for being obnoxious to her friends in public and possibly even kick his ankle if he got out of hand. It was going to be a disaster. This was certain.

“Sam, I know you aren’t thrilled about this event,” said Sybil, making the understatement of the week, “but you didn’t need to ruin Nick’s outfit.” Her sad, accusing eyes made Vimes want to throw himself on the floor and grovel.

But Vimes knew he had not arranged for the ceiling to leak and drywall to fall down on Valentine and his outfit, delaying their departure. Yes, he was the prime suspect, yes, he had a motive, yes, he also had the means, yes, he was often up in the ceiling joists, anyway, because one of his little hobbies was booby-trapping the house, and so yes, Vimes knew how this looked.

He said weakly, “Dear, given my druthers, I would have ruined my _own_ outfit.” It was a ridiculous blue and purple number with pearls. He hated every time Sybil made him wear it.

Sybil looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“I’ll sort this,” he added, quickly.

Valentine’s room was on the other side of Vimes’s dressing room. It had once been Vimes’s room, when he’d lived with Sybil before their marriage, before they’d moved in together to one spacious room the size of most people’s homes. Once Valentine had found out his room had been Vimes’s, he’d gone half-mad trying to find any interesting clues left there by the Commander, much to Vimes’s amusement. Valentine hadn’t found anything, and Vimes didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was nothing to find. Vimes might live in a room, but he didn’t _live_ in a room.

Vimes had put in a door from his dressing room to Valentine’s room, such that he could walk from his room with Sybil, into his dressing room, and into his room with Valentine. It had been a day’s worth of neat carpentry. He was very satisfied with it, especially the way that there was a length of razor wire along the bottom of the door sill, which only retracted out of the way if one gave the wall next to the door an appropriate thump over just the correct spot.

Vimes walked from there, through the bedroom, and over to the door of _Valentine_ ’s dressing room, where he knocked and asked, “If I could just come in and have a look about the ceiling?”

“Fine,” Valentine said flatly.

Vimes did enter, and he climbed up on the counter, peering up at the ceiling.

A soggy, plaster-dusted Valentine was sulking, and he grumbled, “Look, I know you didn’t want me to go -”

“I didn’t do it, and it’s not that, anyway,” Vimes said hottly. There was definitely a leak in the plumbing system, which took filtered water from the rain-catchers on the roof.

“You’ve been sulking ever since Sybil even brought up the idea,” Valentine reminded.

“Well. Yes,” Vimes admitted, “but _I_ hate going to these things. It’s nothing to do with you.” Someone had wrapped a bit of sealing wax around the pipe, which had four neat puncture marks in it, as if someone had hit the pipe with spiked knuckles. Who did Vimes know who used spiked knuckles? Now brass knuckles, Vimes had a set himself, but his were blunt. He was a sentimentalist like that.

The wax had kept the pipe from leaking too much until someone had actually tried to use the water, at which point the change in water pressure had meant that the soft sealing wax burst and the pipe had well and truly splurted, bringing down a chunk of ceiling on poor Valentine.

“No? Seems the man doth protesteth even more than usual,” Valentine said sharply.

Vimes inhaled and admitted, “I… I’m just concerned someone’s going to be unkind to you, that’s all. Probably a lot of someones.”

“If I let that stop me from going places, I wouldn’t go anywhere,” Valentine observed, though he was looking at the four neat holes in the pipe that Vimes had found.

A bit of plaster made Vimes sneeze. He hopped down from the counter. “That’s as may be, but dear, I do get upset about it. I may make a scene.”

“You’re good at that, doll,” Valentine deadpanned.

Vimes winced. “Perhaps a bit too good at it. Look, Codsworth can help you tidy up, and I’m sure we can find a spare outfit that’ll fit you.” Sybil and her ancestors had never thrown away anything if it was usable. “I’m going upstairs.”

Valentine clearly wanted to go with him, because he probably had an idea of what Vimes was going to check, but Vimes flagged down Codsworth in the hallway and set him on Valentine, which, he knew, was cruel of him. However, they had to be ready in time. It was necessary in order to prevent cruelty-to-Vimes committed by Sybil.

The room over Valentine’s room had wooden floors. There were no footprints, but the floorboards just over that pipe were a bit loose. They creaked when Vimes walked over them, and he was able to pry up the planks with just his hands, meaning the nails were very loose. The edges of the boards appeared to have been lightly crowbarred. So someone had pried up the boards here, punched the pipe with spiked knuckles, and covered the pipe with sealing wax to prevent too much of a leak. Vimes knew any number of industrious people who could accomplish such a thing. He was a copper, and this was his own home. It wasn’t hard to figure out.

He returned to Sybil and explained.

“Oh dear. You think Deacon did it?” she said.

Vimes shook his head. “No, dear. The butler did it.”

Willikins had a wicked set of spiked knuckles, a frosty attitude towards Valentine, and incomparable knowledge of the house.

Sybil looked bewildered. “But why would Codsworth do that?”

“I mean Willikins,” said Vimes grimly.

He found the gentleman’s gentleman, the senior butler, innocently cleaning his nails with the sharpest knife anyone had ever seen, down in the scullery, where the old geyser who stoked their water boiler was setting up for a game of cards. Vimes had meant to have a talk with Willikins, because he’d noticed that Willikins was just a teensy bit passive aggressive about Valentine. He told himself that it couldn’t be that Willikins actually disliked Valentine, because if Willikins actually disliked Valentine, no one would ever know it.

Because they’d never find Valentine again.

That was where Vimes caught himself.

What sort of thought was that to be having? He wasn’t a Harry King. He didn’t have employees with names like ‘Trouble’ who turned people into compost.

Vimes’s relationship with Willikins had always been awkward, though. There had been a time, years ago, when Willikins would try to make Vimes come around the back door, when he was calling upon Sybil during their courtship. Even early in Vimes’s marriage to Sybil, Willikins would sometimes ignore Vimes’s directions until they had been repeated by Sybil. Willikins was the Ramkins family butler, even if the family was now the Vimes family.

A sort of awkward friendship had developed over time, and Willikins was one of the few non-Watchmen whom Vimes trusted at his back in a fight, but there was always the distance between a man and his butler, especially when the butler had been his lady wife’s butler first and when the man had been hauled out of a gutter by said lady wife. Vimes had always been just a bit hesitant to correct Willikins.

He cleared his throat and said, “Willikins, a word with you.”

Willikins slunk out of the scullery, and he didn’t say anything, which necessitated that Vimes start. “Some ceiling plaster fell on Nick as he was getting ready because a pipe sprung a leak.”

Willikins didn’t blink. He said, “Someone from the Guild of Plumbers and Dunnikindivers will be here at an indeterminate time in the next two weeks, sir.”

That was how it was going to be, was it? “Nick’s outfit is covered in sodden plaster. Codsworth’s going to find him something else, but we’re going to be late.”

Willikins shrugged, “You could leave without that strumpet. He’s an embarrassment to Her Ladyship, sir.”

Vimes’s brain didn’t quite catch up with ears, and he replied semi-automatically, “I’m an embarrassment to Sybil, and you’ve never gotten rid of me.”

“You’re Her Ladyship’s man, not a tuppence doxy who ought to have been sent out to the country, sir,” said Willikins.

Vimes’s brain caught up, and his face went quite still. “Excuse me?”

“I won’t pretend to understand why sir thinks it appropriate to keep his gimcrack gunsel at his primary residence -”

Vimes grabbed Willikins by the collar and picked him up. “You’re talking about my _fiancé_. He’s not a gunsel or a doxy or a strumpet! You’ve been an _obnoxious,_ petty pilgarlic to him this whole time, and you’re going to stop!”

If it ever came to blows between Vimes and Willikins, it would be a near thing. They both knew this. If only the China and United States of America of the Commonwealth’s past had shown as much prudent restraint as these two men now staring at each other did.

“No more sabotage, no more knocking him into booby-traps, no more ignoring directions, such as 'replace this mattress with a soft one' just because they happen to pertain to Nick," Vimes said flatly, and he let Willikins drop. "Understood?"

It wasn't a far drop. Vimes was short. Willikins landed on his feet, unruffled. He said, "Sir."

Vimes understood what that meant. He'd used it himself many a time.

Sybil called, "Sam, Nick's cleaned up and changed. Come back up, and we'll be ready to go."

Vimes grimaced. "Don't make me need to bring this up again."

* * *

“I think that Rincewind is afraid of me,” said DiMA, in the hallway, to Ponder, and Rincewind, in his own swelteringly-hot office, overheard. Rincewind peeked out of his door.

“Pft,” dismissed Ponder with a wave of his hand. “Rincewind’s afraid of everything. Here’s the papers for Advanced Thaumodynamics, have them back by Octeday.”

“Of course,” said DiMA, who took the papers as if he was seriously going to grade them, of all things, and he turned slightly to part ways with Ponder, which was when he saw Rincewind, and Rincewind knew he’d been seen.

Rincewind was indeed afraid of DiMA, who was not, no matter what Ponder’s other grad students were mostly convinced, ‘from foreign parts’. Then they would vaguely wave their hands and nod, as if that settled it. Rincewind had been to most of the foreign parts that the Disc had to offer, and there were no DiMAs there.

He couldn’t say what DiMA was, but something about that thing prickled the back of his neck and put him in the mind of the Fair Folk. Rincewind had, to his regret, encountered some of the Fair Folk before. For Nac Mac Feegles, one put out whiskey.

DiMA turned on his heel and walked towards Rincewind’s office. Rincewind was able to get the door shut in time, trapping him in the veritable inferno, but DiMA knocked on the door. Rincewind’s office was always very, very hot, because Rincewind received nineteen buckets of coal a day, and the Archchancellor insisted that Rincewind had to use all of them. Each bucket of coal was for a position that had been thrust upon Rincewind because someone had to hold it and no one wanted it. Rincewind was very still and hoped that DiMA would go away. The knock came again.

So DiMA wasn’t the sort of predator that lost interest when his prey could no longer be seen. Rincewind very hesitantly opened the door and made a sound best expressed as, “?”

“I was wondering if I could have a bucket of your coal,” said DiMA, and something that could not be construed as a smile tugged faintly at one side of his mouth. “You appear to have an… adequate supply.”

Rincewind handed DiMA a bucket of coal and shut the door. Whiskey for the Nac Mac Feegle, coal for DiMA…

* * *

“Willikins, I am quite certain you know the difference between water and vodka,” Sybil said mildly. She sat in her study, her hands folded on her lap, looking across her writing desk at Willikins.

For one thing, vodka was not at all useful for putting out a fire when one of the elderly house dragons managed to set Valentine’s pant leg on fire, and vodka was what Willikins had splashed on Valentine in the name of ‘helping’. Valentine was fine, thank the gods. Sybil was meticulous about not only keeping Cunning Artificer-made fire extinguishers around the home but about knowing exactly where the nearest one was at all times.

“In this city, there’s not much difference, your ladyship,” said Willikins, unrepentant.

“Nick is… very dear to me,” Sybil said, blushing. “I will not have any more of your shenanigans.”

“We both know he ought to have been sent to a country home, where he wouldn’t be such an embarrassment to your ladyship,” Willikins said, sulkily.

“No, it’s an embarrassment when I’m late beyond the socially acceptable lateness period because Nick has to scramble to find something else to wear,” Sybil said sharply.

“If the Commander won’t send him away, perhaps that mechanical malkin can be convinced to go on his own, your ladyship,” said Willikins, who was evidently having his own conversation separate from Sybil’s.

“You’re being _rude_ to him to try to make him leave?” Sybil stated carefully, just to see if she had that straight.

“Yes, your ladyship, although I might have to step up to boorish, I’m afraid,” admitted Willikins.

“Willikins. I do not desire this,” Sybil said firmly. Putting aside how much she liked Valentine, it was a small comfort knowing that, when her Sam was out tangling with the likes of Maximilian 'Numbers' Calamari, that there might be someone there with him with a _very_ vested interest in keeping her Sam alive.

“But your ladyship, it’s an insult to you for him to keep his clockwork catamite here!” Willikins protested. 

“Sam is not the one insulting me at the moment,” Sybil observed, “I don’t think my darling Mr. Valentine needs an extended country vacation, but perhaps you and Silver,” her butler at the Crundells, her country home, “would like an exchange of positions.”

Willikins’s eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open. “Your ladyship, you wouldn’t!”

“I would,” said Sybil. 

“I don’t understand, your ladyship,” said Willikins, trembling at the threat.

“You needn’t understand. You need only be civil and cease this chicanery,” said Sybil gently.

“Yes, your ladyship,” Willikin mumbled numbly, still looking as if someone had taken a two by four to his head.

Sybil smiled. “Very good. Now, if you could have the footman ready my carriage, Mr. Valentine and I will be taking in the Ankh-Morpork Ballet tonight.”

* * *

Why did humans think to themselves: _Cesspools! I ought to lean over and stick my head down there!_? Of course, that wasn’t what had happened. Mr. Giles 'Garrote' Hays definitely hadn’t decided to cosh himself over the head and then dump himself into a cesspool, no matter what Mr. Heber Willis, the landlord to whom said cesspool technically belonged, insisted.

“Happens all the time,” he said.

“I don’t doubt that,” Valentine said dryly. If they dredged the cesspool, they’d probably find dozens of corpses and skeletons in various stages of decay. “We still have to write it up.”

So there was paperwork, and there was showering at the Yard and giving thanks to Mother Mary that his seals were still watertight. This was why Valentine was late to the Vimes residence. He was, in fact, able to sneak up on Lady Sybil and Vimes, although he hadn’t been trying to sneak up on them; he was just trying not to alert Willikins.

"Well Sam, dear, you might want to consider other venue options aside from the Unseen University,” said Lady Sybil.

Vimes was protesting, “You know that I love him, I’ve told you, dear, but I don’t see why we even need to bring it up.”

Lady Sybil said patiently, “Your Mr. Valentine is religious. He might want a church wedding.”

That was what Valentine walked into, and what Vimes had said caught his attention far more so than any discussion of venue. He excused, “Sorry I’m late. Had to go cesspool diving and shower up afterwards. So, what were you saying, Sam?” Because that had been something Valentine had been dying to hear, if he’d heard it correctly. He didn’t quite dare to hope.

“Oh, ah, that we can have this wedding at the Unseen University. I’m sure Mustrum’ll be fine with it. The Dean’s gone, but I can probably get Mustrum to officiate,” said Vimes, giving Valentine a narrow look that said, _What are you doing, sneaking up like that?_

“And I was saying that you could at least discuss venue options,” said Sybil, “And… cesspool?”

“No, no, back that up to the bit just before, ‘I’ve told you, dear,’” Valentine directed Vimes, making a rewinding gesture with his hand. Then he answered Lady Sybil with, “It was just work.”

“The bit just before...” said Vimes, thinking back to what he’d just said. “‘You know I love him’?”

“Oh, yes, he’s mentioned that,” said Sybil, who arched an eyebrow and peered at her husband, as if there was a question that she wanted to ask him and was unsure how to phrase it delicately, “most times that you come up in conversation, really.”

Vimes said hastily, “And, of course, I love you, dear,” making rather frantic eye contact at Lady Sybil.

Valentine twitched and asked bluntly, “Sam, why have you told your wife and not me?” He didn’t know whether to kiss Vimes or kill him. Vimes loved him! His fans went _whirr-whirr_ at the thought. Vimes had neglected to tell him but had apparently told his wife repeatedly. Valentine was not, inherently, a violent person. He preferred peaceful resolutions. Still, the only reason he didn’t deck Vimes was that his lady wife was right there.

“You haven’t told him?” Sybil inquired, sighing wearily.

“I’m sure I must have… at some point,” said Vimes, who was looking from Lady Sybil to Valentine and looking like he didn’t particularly want to be caught between them at the moment.

Valentine touched his hand to the side of his head and said, “This is me running a deep scan of my memory. And this is me coming up with zilch, zero, nada occurences of you saying, ‘I love you’ to me, which I’ll note, you still haven’t actually done.” He crossed his arms. Valentine hadn’t wanted to push the matter. Vimes clearly cared, and Valentine told himself that had to be good enough, but that had been before this whole thing. The matter was going to be pushed.

Vimes protested, “You’re sure? I mean, you’ve been hit in the head and -”

“I’m sure I would remember!” Valentine snapped.

“Why haven’t you told him?” asked Sybil, half-covering her face with her hand.

Vimes looked back and forth between them and seemed to realize that he was backing himself off a cliff. “Erm. Nick Valentine, I love you, and I haven’t said it… because I am very, very bad at this.”

Valentine did kiss him, though he kept open an option to punch him later. He was loved. His fiance was an asshole at times, but he was loved.

* * *

“Sweetheart, could’ja run this deed poll paperwork by your lawyer?” asked Valentine, handing Vimes a file folder of paperwork, filled out in his neat handwriting.

Vimes took the file folder gingerly and asked, “What’s this?”

“Deed poll to change my last name to Valentine-Vimes,” said Valentine. “There’s no mechanism for a man or otherwise male-ish person to change his last name as a part of a wedding ceremony, unless he’s marrying a witch, so I’m just going to submit a deed poll for a name change and hope it gets processed in time by the clerks.”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Vimes, frowning as he flipped through the paperwork.

“You outrank him. Of course he should. The precedent’s fairly clear. Now, one could argue that he ought to just take your name and not hyphenate -” started Sybil, who was flipping through swatches of paper for name place cards for wedding seating.

“I’m hyphenating,” Valentine said flatly.

Vimes’s right eye twitched, making the scar over it jump. “You really don’t need to do this.”

Vimes hated being reminded of his rank, Valentine knew. He explained, “But I want to, and that’s not really why. I think I told you clothes make the man, once? So do names. I want people to just get over themselves and accept me as your husband and stop making a huge scene out of this. This has more the... shape of the thing, if I take your name. And plus, if I have to go pick up the boys, it’s one thing if I’m some random synthetic detective, but if I’m using your name and still standing, that means I’m using your name and haven’t been kicked in the shins over it, which means I’m probably someone legit to pick up the boys. That sort of thing.”

Vimes frowned deeply and glared at the paperwork. “Hmph. I suppose. As long as it’s what you want.” He made deliberate eye contact with Valentine and then glanced sidelong at Sybil.

“Sure, Sybil brought it up, but I want this,” said Valentine.

Vimes had the look of someone who was giving due contemplation to accidentally on purpose mislaying the paperwork, possibly in one of the fireplaces, but he gritted out, “Fine. I’ll run it by Morecombe.”

* * *

“Why aren’t you married yet?” Visit asked Valentine sharply.

Vimes heard this, down the hallway, as he ambled down to pick up Valentine for the night. Vimes insisted on his two patrols a week - he’d go stir-crazy, if he didn’t, if he left himself to drown under the paperwork without coming up for air - and Carrot had continued to insist that Vimes go with _someone_ , usually Valentine because he was consummately flexible about scheduling. The only thing he wouldn’t do was be in two places at once. However, sometimes the patrol partner assigned to Vimes might well be Carrot himself, Detritus, or Angua. Vimes had winced a bit when he’d realized the pattern there.

It was all people Carrot knew or suspected would hold Vimes back, if they had to.

“Gee, Visit, probably because weddings take a hundred days to plan, to listen to Lady Sybil, and we wouldn’t want to not listen to Lady Sybil, now would we?” Valentine drawled.

“The current land speed record for a _proper_ church wedding,” which, to Visit, meant an Omnian one, “is one minute fifty-two seconds,” Visit said crisply.

Vimes didn’t quite know what he was walking into, but he didn’t want to know, either.

“Yeah, well, the Commander there,” Valentine did not turn to look at Vimes approaching or otherwise give any tell that he’s noticed Vimes, “don’t want a church wedding, and I can’t say I do, either -”

“I just think you’re being very flippant about your immortal soul,” Visit sighed. “Every day that you expose yourself to…” he sounded dubious, here, “temptation, you run a risk. You could just get married, get it squared away -”

Valentine looked up from where he was sitting and unerringly locked his eyes on Vimes. “Oh, hello there, Commander. Elm Street beat?”

Vimes hadn’t actually said where they were going, but Valentine wasn’t wrong. He grunted.

“Mr. Vimes,” said Visit, nodding, “are you aware that, as long as you do not lay with Valentine as you would with a woman or, as Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments would argue, in a bed that is the legal property of a woman, although I feel his argument is overly literalistic, and, as long as Valentine is not your mother, sister, sister-in-law, daughter, granddaughter, aunt, slave, friend’s slave…”

He went on for some time. Vimes’s eyes glazed. 

“...or your vampiric spawn in the case of you being a vampire, your wedding should be technically valid.”

“I know it’ll be valid,” Vimes said sharply.

“In a spiritual sense,” Visit added, as if that meant anything.

“Well. Good. And yes, Elm Street beat,” confirmed Vimes to Valentine, who took that excuse to leave gratefully.

After a bit, Vimes asked, “Visit’s not, er, troubling you, is he? He’s a good copper, he’s just…” 

“No. I sat down with him and Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments and some chocolate cookies,” Valentine was strange about that word; he used it to mean ‘biscuits’, “and we sorted it out. Though, now Visit’s got it in his head that he has to bequeath manna unto the elderly, and he’s really not a very good baker…” 

* * *

Valentine wanted to spend more time with DiMA, he told himself. He told himself that extra hard as he found himself wandering the swamps near the Ankh River delta rimwards of the city proper.

DiMA needed to gather ingredients. Of course he did.

“DiMA, I’m sure we could find this stuff at a bazaar,” Valentine had said.

“I imagine we could, but there may be the matter that I gave away all of my spending money to the victims of the _Aftermath_ icono-game,” DiMA had replied.

And DiMA didn’t have much to spend in the first place, Valentine knew, and he was about as prideful as Valentine was about not accepting gifts. Valentine was salaried; he could have easily bought DiMA some weird spices, but no, here they were in the swamp. Feral swamp dragons, the descendants of abandoned pets from the city, flapped around in the swamp. Every now and then, the sound of one exploding split the air.

DiMA was gathering mushrooms. They were red with white spots. Valentine asked, “Aren’t those the poisonous ones?”

“Hopefully,” said DiMA.

“So uh, whatever did happen with that professor who was giving you and your friends such grief?” Valentine said. DiMA hadn’t said anything about the guy in a long time.

“Died of a mistargeted spell,” DiMA said crisply.

Valentine made no comment.

Valentine also didn’t ask DiMA about why the _hell_ a tax clerk who looked like Tektus, if someone had paid an Igorina to strip all of Tektus’s tattoos off and then shoved him in a clerk’s unassuming suit, had shown up, started an attempt to collect the back-taxes from the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway, and, remarkably, hadn’t yet ended up dead in a compost pile courtesy of one of Harry King’s men. That had made the third page news. Valentine didn’t think DiMA could possibly have a good explanation for how that could have happened. Tektus, after all, had hung.

Then DiMA was gathering some weed that looked like little ears. A blood-tinged bunch of water lilies were added to the basket. He also collected several bunches of little heart-shaped flowers that gently oozed.

Valentine picked up one, which exuded on his fingers. He shook his hands, flicking off the gunk. “So what do you do with these?”

“Love-lies-oozing is used in several formulations of love potions,” said DiMA.

“Look, I know the Patrician takes laissez faire approach when it comes to drugs you can’t easily kill yourself or someone else with, but drugging someone to make them love you is always going to be assault in my book,” Valentine snapped.

“I was not planning on brewing that sort of love potion,” DiMA said stiffly. “It’s just homework. You can have it when I’m done with it, if you like.”

Before Valentine could ask for clarification, he noticed someone wearing black in the swamp. Black wasn’t a great colour to use as camouflage in a city, and it was worse in this swamp. Had no one ever heard of a Ghillie suit?53 No, probably not, it would be a Pseudopolis suit or something. He wearily took cover behind a tree that was mostly gnarled roots gasping for air, and he went for his crossbow.

DiMA didn’t have his staff with him. He’d explained that a wizard wandering around with his staff was sort of like a noble wandering around with a sword that wasn’t peace-tied, only most nobles these days didn’t know the pointy end from the hilt, whereas most wizards did still know how to use their staffs. DiMA had put it somewhat more politely.

An arrow lodged itself in Valentine’s chest. It hurt. It was annoying. He looked down. “You’ve gone and put a hole in one of my ties. Now I’m _upset_.”

DiMA said that the Archchancellor complained the duck hunting wasn’t very good out here, but Valentine was more concerned about other things hunting him, and it hurt to be right. Asssassins didn’t come after him in the street; they considered it terribly gauche. They hadn’t, so far, come after him when he was at home or at work, because Vimes had trapped those places, so Assassins only came to those locations to study. No, Assassins just decided to bother him when he was out with his friends in a public setting, and it didn’t get more public than a stinking swamp.

Valentine fired back at her. He missed; he was good with a crossbow, but this wasn’t a good crossbow, and the humidity of the swamp, even when it was cold, threw off his calculations. 

DiMA picked a lily out of the basket and methodically plucked off its petals. 

The figure fired at him again, but this time, he took cover behind his tree in time. The black-clad figure broke and ran and… stumbled over a gnarled tree root. Valentine chased her down and found another perishingly fashionable Assassin who’d worn stylish shoes into a swamp. But didn’t they train Assassins to run in heels? He sighed and worked on using some swamp vines to tie her to a tree.

“Let’s see, who took a commission on me today…” Valentine rummaged through her effects.

“I must protest!” the Assassin protested. She sounded like she just might be from Fourecks.

“Go ahead. Protest all you like… ah hah, Miss Audrey Buchanan? And let’s see, what was my death worth this time… ah, you’ve got $2000 on you, which means someone paid $4000 to see me dead. Or someones. See, I know that you’re not going to say who your patron is -”

“I would never!” Buchanan said, indignant.

Valentine lit a cigarette, just so he could gesture with it as he talked. “- but I like to imagine it’s, oh, the League of Decency. Or maybe the Council of Churches, Temples, Sacred Groves and Big Ominous Rocks. Either way. Whoever it is, whoever they are, if they can afford to put up $4000 to see me dead, they can damn well pay their taxes, but you know what? I’m also damn sure they're dodging their taxes if they’re blowing silly money trying to see lil’ ol’ me dead.”

There was still a thread in the back of his head thinking about the third page news about that new tax collector who wasn’t dead yet.

“Churches are generally exempt from most taxes,” DiMA said, absently, “As are nonprofits, which creates the situation where both prophet and nonprofit can be tax exempt.”

Valentine pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and took a drag on his cigarette. 

“That does sound sort of frustrating,” Buchanan admitted. “I don’t suppose you’d want any of them inhumed? Priests are tax deductible for us.”

“No! I don’t want anyone killed, and I include me in that ‘anyone’,” Valentine grumbled.

“I have to ask… what exactly did you do to Mr. Crogan and Miss Cropper?” said Buchanan.

“All I did was talk to ‘em,” Valentine said, shrugging.

“No enchantments or influences?” Buchanan asked.

“No. One, that’s wrong, and two, I can’t even do magic,” Valentine snapped.

“Don’t do magic, to be more precise,” DiMA corrected.

Valentine elected to ignore that rejoinder.

“You’re telling me one trained Assassin quit to become a missionary and the other quit to become a doctor just because you talked to them?” said Buchanan, who looked increasingly concerned.

“Look, I just don’t think it’s a career for anyone with some self-respect,” said Valentine, shrugging.

“Hah! A likely story. So what, next thing you know, I’ll be telling you that I’m going to go become a tax clerk?” scoffed Buchanan.

“Sure, why not?” said Valentine.

Buchanan narrowed her eyes at Valentine. Then she blustered, “I’m, uhm, going to think about some things.”

“You do that, Miss Buchanan,” said Valentine gently, “and try not to make any sudden noises. It sets off the swamp dragons.” Lady Sybil had warned him. 

He and DiMA headed off.

After some time, he reluctantly asked, “You didn’t do anything to her head?”

“Assassins tend to be proud, arrogant people. Make something a challenge, and their honour demands they marshall a response,” said DiMA. “I suspect you know that.”

“Yeah, yeah, but I mean…” Valentine looked left and right. “I mean, with magic.” He hated to say that. He hated the thought that DiMA was doing something strange that Valentine couldn’t explain with the fabric of reality.

DiMA’s posture changed, somehow becoming even stiffer, and there was something of anger, like the ashes after a fire, about his bearing. “Nick. My brother. _No._ ”

“Okay, okay, I saw the bit with you tearing up that flower -” Valentine started, sagging with relief.

“That was me convincing a swamp tree that it wanted to move its root to trip her.”

53 [Ghillie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit#History) isn’t actually a location.

* * *

"Congratulations, Deacon, on finally figuring out how to break into and out of the Watch house without getting caught. Now where the hell did you get that thing?" Valentine snarled, slapping down an iconograph onto Deacon’s desk at the Golem Trust.

He’d found it in his locker. It was a photo of Sam Vimes, looking perhaps half a decade younger and very, very cold, judging by lil’ Vimes. He was stark naked and running on Scoone Avenue. A moment of thought had told Valentine that while Watchmen might put bundles of sticks or cracked pots in his locker, no Watchman who wanted to live would put a naked picture of Sam Vimes in Valentine’s locker, which had narrowed his list of suspects considerably.

"A reporter never identifies his sources," Deacon replied coolly.

"Deacon, you're not a reporter," said Valentine, exasperated.

“I’ve been thinking about getting into the food critic gig,” said Deacon, flippantly. “I could get paid to complain about other people’s cooking.”

Valentine sighed.

Klug, the golem duty receptionist at the Trust, was paying mild attention to Valentine looming over Deacon, and he glanced at the iconograph. He said, “Is Commander Vimes Streaking Again?”

“No, this is old, and I bet Deacon bought a copy out of the _Times_ ’s archives,” Valentine grumbled.

“Whispers is totally a repressed nudist, though,” said Deacon, leaning back in his chair.

Klug said, “Thank You For Specifying That This Is An Older Picture. It Is Important To Keep Track Of When The Moon Is Full. Many Religious And Traditional Festivals Are Scheduled In Line With Lunar Phases, And This Picture Definitely Displays A Full Moon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** This week we added a flashback one-shot scene that takes place when the Fallout characters had only been in Ankh-Morpork for a little over a month. If you want to read it, check out [Saturday Night Fight Club](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25861702/chapters/63501211) over in **Valentine & Vimes: Illegal Crossbows.**
> 
>  **S:** We also added art for chapters 2 and 3 of this fic. Feel free to go back and have a look-see, although keep in mind that chapter 3 was one of our NSFW chapters, and so is the art.
> 
>  **S:** Finally, we have art added to chapter 8 from [JerkyVulture on tumblr](https://jerkyvulture.tumblr.com/tagged/commission) and chapter 9 from [Voxel on Tumblr](https://voxel-loves-you.tumblr.com/drawing-commissions), if you want to go back and look at those.
> 
>  **A:** In the Discworld series, one gets the sense that, in earlier drafts of the Moist books, that Vetinari was thinking about setting up Moist von Lipwig as the next Taxmaster.
>
>> “Apropos of nothing, how old is Mr. Creaser?”  
> “The taxmaster? In his seventies, sir,” said Drumknott, opening the file he had just selected. “Yes, seventy-four, it says here.”  
> “We have recently pondered his methods, have we not?”
> 
> There is also the sense that Vetinari may have wanted to break Moist’s popularity.
>
>> “Mr. Lipwig is a very…popular young man, is he not, Drumknott?” said Vetinari, staring into the gloom.
> 
> Popularity is a type of power. Vetinari survives by not letting any one person have too much power. I think Vetinari’s thought process was that, if he made Moist the Taxmaster, it would make Moist unpopular (no one likes taxes) and would thusly break some of Moist’s power. That said, Vetinari is also smart. He’s seen Moist take the Postmaster – a despised position – and make a sort of rock star out of the Postmaster. Would making Moist the Taxmaster break Moist’s power? No, but it would probably make taxes somehow popular.
> 
> Does it actually benefit Vetinari to give Moist more power at this point? No. Moist is now the Postmaster, the Master of the Mint, the Chair of the Royal Bank, and Mr. Railway, and he’s married to the Chair of the Grand Trunk Clack Company and a trustee of the Golem Trust. Think about that a moment. The Postmaster is married to the post’s direct competition, the clacks. In addition, Moist is the Master of the Mint, the Chair of the Royal Bank… and Sir Harry King’s personal financier. Moist has conflicts of interest coming and going.
> 
> Aside from his conflicts of interest, Moist is also the sort of person who is clever at coming up with temporary fixes to problems, but his temporary fixes tend to lead to even worse problems down the road. (See the whole cabbage stamp debacle.) This does not promote long-term city stability.
> 
> So no. Vetinari does not benefit by giving Moist more power at this point.
> 
> But give Vetinari a man with a blank mind (courtesy of an elf nuking his brain) and a synth who can print new minds whole cloth on a person, and that’s something Vetinari can work with, with regards to his tax situation.
> 
> Also, Matthew Alphaeusson is absolutely a joke reference.
> 
>  **S** : (By the way, we don’t really intend to have a full story dedicated to reforming AM’s tax system, but given how heavy canon was beating that drum, we wanted to acknowledge that SOMETHING was happening in the background.)
> 
> * * *
> 
>  **A:** Snuff has Vimes and Willikins (and also a bunch of other characters) behaving somewhat uncharacteristically. Vimes, who thinks rather dark thoughts about what should be done to the users of one shot crossbows in The Fifth Elephant, is now suddenly okay with having an illegal crossbow of his own… buried in his basement, where his butler, Wilkins, can get at it and use it, a sort of special private law that only applies to Willikins. This is almost whiplash-inducing. Vimes accepting one law for the public and a different law for Willikins? Ye gods, what’s happened to the man? Vimes feels _entitled_ , something that has usually horrified him about the rich and powerful. In Snuff Vimes starts to become what he’s always hated.
> 
> What’s happened to the man, indeed. (Wealth and power and the Summoning Dark, which cries for vengeance and retribution, not justice.)
> 
> Anyway, Nick’s not going to tolerate double-standards out of Sam. Maybe Sam’s strange new Commonwealth friends will be, in a sense, a good influence on him.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	20. Etiquette * Stag Night * Guests and Gifts * Lawfully Wedded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Etiquette](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HSUNcIpkew&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=28) by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Etiquette * Stag Night * Guests and Gifts * Lawfully Wedded_

Vimes had resigned himself to the fact that he was going to dinner with the Eorles, Downeys, Hangfingers, Selachiis, Venturiis, and Witherings. Sybil had put it on his schedule. The yellow and red, or possibly _or_ and _gules_ ,54 suit had shown up in his dressing room. Vimes had begged whatever power might be listening for an urgent case of unlicensed theft or embezzlement or extortion to show up on his door - nothing violent, no one killed, just something to get him out of this society dinner. Alas, no reprieve came.

Vimes stopped by the boys’ room, where Valentine was just tucking them into bed. It had been such a relief to Vimes, how young Sam had taken to Valentine, but then, the boy loved being the centre of attention, and Valentine was yet another person to give him attention. Valentine raised an eyebrow over Vimes’s enforced attire, but thankfully, he didn’t say anything.

Then Sybil, still in her full dragon keeper’s armour, said, “Sam, Queen-of-Platinum’s egg bound. It’s a very touchy situation. You know how it goes. I’m going to have to bow out for tonight.”

When a dragon had an egg stuck in her oviduct, it was quite like defusing a bomb, Vimes was aware. Quite like.

A manic smile spread across his face. “Ah, so I’ll stay in tonight?”

Sybil shook her head. “I’m sure it’ll throw off the seating chart if you don’t make it. It would be terribly rude not to show. Why don’t you take Nick?”

“I don’t want to take Nick!” Vimes blurted, unthinking.

Immediately, there was a hurt look on Nick’s face.

Vimes attempted to unstick his metaphorical foot from his mouth and added, “Er. Not that I don’t want to spend time with you, Nick, but you remember, when Sybil introduced you to some of her friends, how the one footman tried to make you go around the back door and then there were coarse insinuations about back doors, and then that prat Viscount Skater couldn’t… even see you?”

“Yeah. Thanks for reminding me,” Valentine said glumly, leaving the boys’ room to come to the hall where Vimes and Sybil were standing.

“They’ll get used to Nick. He’s a perfectly lovely person,” said Sybil, with absolute confidence.

Vimes’s face screwed into a grimace. He asked hesitantly, “Do you _want_ to go, Nick? It’s the Eorles, Downeys, Hangfingers, Selachiis, Venturiis, and Witherings.”

“Downeys? As in the head honcho of the cleaners?” asked Valentine.

“Well no, Mrs. Manger is President of the Launderers' Guild, but in the sense you intended it, yes,” said Vimes, frowning.

Valentine smiled, not pleasantly. “Yeah. I’d like to get a good look at that chucklehead.”

“Splendid! Then it’s settled!” said Sybil, who clapped them both on the shoulders and tromped back off towards her dragon kennels.

That was how Vimes ended up with Valentine at the Eorles’ residence. The Duke of Eorle was the noble of a city in the Ramtops who left the running of his city to underlings, preferring to live it up in Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city of the Disc. His footman said, looking down his nose, “That is not on the guest list, your Grace, and we were expecting her Grace, the Duchess Sybil?”

“ _He_ is my fiance, and he’s here because Sybil told him to come in her stead because she’s busy with an egg bound dragon,” Vimes snarled. “So if you’d like to take it up with my lady wife about her choice of representative -”

“I simply cannot let that in, your Grace,” said the footman.

Valentine rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I can see that you can’t afford to let in someone with actual manners. Might show you how it’s done.”

“Fine!” Vimes snapped, and he turned to Valentine. “We’ll go take in… I don’t know, but we’ll go do _something_.” He owned property all across Ankh and Morpork. He owned the land on which the Assassins’ Guild sat. Vimes probably owned a music hall or a dance hall or something somewhere, and if Valentine had difficulty getting in on account of being a bent Unalive, Vimes was in enough of a temper to throw around that he was a landlord.

It was at this point that the Eorles’s butler, drawn by the shouting, slightly frantically insisted, “You can’t let His Grace go! It’ll throw off the catering!”

“Too late, I’m going,” said Vimes, turning back towards the carriage.

The butler glared at the footman and suggested, “Your Grace, I will see to it that this cur is whipped -"

"No. Absolutely not," said Vimes, who despaired of the working man's unfortunate tendency to turn on his fellow working man to appease his supposed social 'betters'.

Valentine put his metal hand on Vimes's arm, and he said, "I'd take an apology, though, if that's an option. I'm a him, not a that."

The doorman looked stricken. "Er. Your Grace, I apologize -"

"To Nick," Vimes prompted.

The doorman shuffled uncomfortably. "...Mr. er, Valentine? I apologize if I caused any offense."

"If? Yeah, you sure did, but I'll take it," said Valentine.

"You're too nice," Vimes observed.

"Oh yeah, I put up with you, don't I?" Valentine winked.

The butler showed them in and ushered them to their seats, though he looked flummoxed, and the already present guests alternatively sneered at or ignored Valentine. "Uhm. This is most irregular, your Grace. You see, this does throw off the alternating pattern of ladies and gentlemen."

"Fine," said Vimes, smiling. "Why don't you add a lavender couple to compensate?"

The Duke of Eorle ahemed. "We were, ah, expecting Her Grace."

"Dragon emergency. Sybil asked Nick to go in her stead," said Vimes. If one more person made a fuss…

The awkward silence settled heavy and smothering. Vimes and Valentine moved simultaneously to get the chair for each other and collided.

“There would seem to be certain inherent reasons why that sort of relation ought not be undertaken,” Lady Selachii observed archly, of the crash.

Vimes angrily threw himself into his chair. 

"Shouldn't be? Nah, we just need more practice. Thanks for having us, your Grace," Valentine said smoothly, taking his chair.

Silence returned.

Valentine inquired pleasantly, "How is Eorle this time of year, your Grace?"

Vimes privately marvelled that Valentine could be so… classy, at a time when Vimes felt half-inarticulate with rage.

The Duke of Eorle blinked slowly. After a moment, he said, "Buried under three feet of snow, I wager." He laughed uncertainly. “It’s a dreadful place, really. Mm-hmmm.”

Then, fashionably late as always, the Downeys arrived. Some folks had been shocked to hear that Downey had a wife, but Vimes thought, cynically, it probably just meant that she was a better Assassin than her mate. Certainly, she was better at keeping a low profile.

Downey elegantly held out the chair for his lady, who sat down modestly, and then he took his own. He looked at Vimes and then let his gaze slide over to Valentine, and he said, “Ah, Commander, I see you brought your latest publicity stunt with you.”

Vimes looked down at his suit. It was the red and yellow one. What was the damned Assassin going on about?

Valentine tensed. _Oh._

“You’re not fooling anyone, you know. It’s not as if you could possibly be actually attracted to him,” said Downey. There was a glass of whiskey at Downey’s seat, and he sipped it. “We all know that you have your pet crusades.”

“You think. My engagement to Nick is a... _publicity stunt_?” Vimes said slowly, incredulously.

“You’ve not once contracted for your wife’s inhumation, nor has she you. It’s downright unnatural for a couple of your social status, but nonetheless, as the poets would say, if that’s not true love…” Downey trailed off, sipping his whiskey again.

“What - I would _never_!” Vimes seethed. His hands thumped against the table, and he flipped his _amuse gueule_ off its tiny plate and into Lady Withering’s wig, where it blended in with the local ornaments and swiftly integrated into the highly regimented wig society.

“Case in point,” Downey said, waving his free hand dismissively.

“I can fancy more than one person! You can’t stop me!” Vimes snapped, his second thoughts only belatedly interceding to remind him how ridiculous he sounded.

Downey looked to Valentine and said in kindly tone, “You’re taking being used by the Commander to make a point very well, I must say.”

“Oh yeah, I love Sam’s point,” deadpanned Valentine.

Vimes choked on his fruit drink.

“He’d be quite affordable to have inhumed, you should know,” Downey continued, looking back from Valentine to Vimes.

“No! I don’t want Nick inhumed!” Vimes sputtered, his fingertips digging into the tablecloth and bunching it up.

“That said, I don’t suppose you could stop talking my graduates out of their vocations, hmm?” said Downey, turning again to Valentine.

“Miss Buchanan’s going to be throwing her life away, working as a tax collector in the revenue,” said Lady Downey, the picture of concern.

“Ha ha, she really joined the revenue!?” Valentine laughed.

“We’re so terribly concerned for her. She’s labouring under the delusion that inhuming the city’s debt via collecting the unpaid back taxes will level the societal playing field… as if such a thing would even be desirable.” Lady Downey shuddered.

Vimes was missing something. “Why are you talking to Assassins at all?”

“Eh. She was trying to kill me,” Valentine said, shrugging.

“Please, ‘inhume’ is the proper term,” corrected Lady Downey, like a school dame.

“Wait, Audrey ‘Headshot’ Buchanan?” Vimes said, with alarm. The woman could punch an arrow through a steel helmet at 180 meters! Not that Assassins much liked doing that. It wasn’t sporting, they said. Still.

“I guess,” said Valentine.

“Best archer of her year,” said Lady Downey, shaking her head.

“Nick, why didn’t you tell me ‘Headshot’ Buchanan tried to kill you?” Vimes demanded.

“You get worried,” Valentine demurred.

“And I only found out that Merritt 'Cemetery’ Crogan made an attempt because _Piper_ told me,” Vimes scolded.

“See? You’re doing it. You’re getting all worked up. Simmer down and eat your soup, Sam,” said Valentine, examining his beverage. It was a sherry.

“And Irene Cropper, too,” added Lady Downey, sadly.

“‘Weeping Angel’ Cropper?” said Vimes, spilling his soup.

“The poor dear’s going to be a doctor now. It goes against everything we taught her!” bemoaned Lady Downey.

Vimes grabbed Valentine’s shoulder, and he hissed, “Nick, _tell me_ when people are trying to assassinate you.”

“And Mr. Crogan. He had such a bright future ahead of him, and now it’s all a waste,” sighed Lord Downey.

“Sam, it’s fine. I can look after myself,” said Valentine, placatingly, “And the soup goes in your mouth, not on your face.” He dabbed at Vimes’s face with his napkin.

“But I want to look after you,” Vimes sulked, and then a thought occurred, and he added, “We’re partners.”

Lady Hangfinger, who was one of Sybil’s expansive circle of friends, turned a dubious look at Downey as Valentine wiped soup off Vimes’s face, and she said, “A publicity stunt. Really.”

“Of course, the price on his head will go up if you go through with this nonsense and make a Marquess of him, so you really ought to consider getting it done soon. You’d save yourself the cost of a wedding, as well,” said Lord Downey, brightly.

Downey was deliberately provoking him, Vimes was sure, but gods, it worked, didn’t it? The Duke of Eorle, though, asked, “My word. The Ankh-Morpork title laws would allow for a spouse who is… not a… wife and, ah… not… human, shall we say?”

“There’s actually a precedent for it,” said Lady Hangfinger, with some pleasure at being more well-informed than her host. Sybil _must_ have written her a letter.

The Duke of Eorle took a moment, fingers drumming on the edge of the table as he clearly thought about the implications. “A… not… human would be entitled to a title outranking most of the ancestral human nobility of the city… but not me.” He smiled. “You are a jokester, are you not, Commander?”

Vimes didn’t want to inflict a title on Valentine! But as he looked around as various looks of offense and resentment settled on almost everyone at the table, Vimes thought that he could learn to live with it. Anything that offended so many people had something to say for it in its defense. He swallowed a spoonful of soup and replied, “Ye-es, that is absolutely what I am known for.”

“And what does… he… do?” inquired the Duke of Eorle, in the manner of a child picking apart a dead bird.

“I’m a detective, your Grace,” supplied Valentine.

“We had not heard your Watch had hired another Captain,” Lord Venturi said frostily. Oh yes, he’d have a reason to keep track of Watch Captains, he would.

“I’m a Constable,” your lordship,” said Valentine.

“You insist on plaguing us with a _bête noire_ , and you do not even have the decency to select an officer?” said Lady Selachii sharply.

Vimes marvelled at the mental gymnastics necessary there, such that Valentine’s rank was the unforgivable thing about Vimes courting him. He really ought to have hired Valentine on as at least a Sergeant, but if him being a Constable offended the gentry… well, it would be unfair to _never_ promote Valentine. Vimes said carefully, “I’m going to just stay out of it as much as I could and leave it to Captains Carrot, Angua, and Sally. That’s the fairest thing, given the circumstances. I wouldn’t want for Nick to deal with any accusations of nepotism.”

Vimes and Valentine were met with blank, uncomprehending stares that seemed to ask, _Why **wouldn’t** you promote him, if you like him and the power is yours? That’s what power is for._

To bridge the chasm that yawned before them, the Duchess of Eorle asked, “Do you not like Escoffier’s oxtail soup55? You haven’t touched it, Mr. Valentine.”

“As has been mentioned, I’m not human, your Grace,” Valentine said wryly. “It wouldn’t go so swell if I ate the soup, though it sure does smell nice. Sam, you’re enjoying it, aren’t you? The spoonfuls that you put in your mouth, anyway.”

“Huh? Oh. Yes. Soup. Very soupy,” said Vimes.

“But I’ve seen you drink the sherry,” said Lady Selachii, suspiciously, as she drank something blue that was garnished with an anchovy.

“Yeah, I can manage that -” Valentine started.

“Don’t they have support groups for that?” prodded Lady Selachii, shooting Vimes a meaningful look.

Valentine narrowed his eyes. “Your Ladyship, I burn alcohol like a train burns coal.”

“One always thinks one has a tolerance,” Lady Selachii scolded, with mock sadness..

Valentine said slowly and clearly, “I am incapable of inebriation, your Ladyship.”

“An intriguing boast,” said Lord Venturi.

“I ain’t braggin’, and it’s nothing to brag about, anyway,” said Valentine sourly. “There’s no pride in being able to guzzle radiator moonshine without going blind.”

“My word. What a party trick,” said Lord Venturi, not listening. “I wager I could match you drink for drink.”

Valentine looked sidelong at Lord and Lady Downey. “I wager you two know what alcohol poisoning looks like?”

Lady Downey sniffed, “It’s terribly uncouth.”

“Just watch for it, will you? Wouldn’t want his Lordship to have to call for his personal physician,” said Valentine, and then he looked over at Vimes, and asked anxiously, “If you’re all right with it?”

Was Vimes all right with Valentine drinking Venturi under the table because he was being an idiot? It was a waste of good alcohol, putting it into Venturi, but if Vimes couldn’t touch a glass himself - no matter how much he wanted to - then he could live with Valentine exhausting the Duke of Eorle’s cellar.

“All right? Oh yes, but I’m going to insist that you do the MacAbre Finest Malt for your contest.”

If Vimes couldn’t have it, then neither could the Duke of Eorle. Not when they were done here.

54 [Heraldry really is its own language.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_\(heraldry\)#List)

55 [A recipe for something similar,](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/22/recipes-escoffier-oxtail-blanc-coq-au-vin) should you want to give it a shot. Warning: the link contains a certain ‘f-word’ that’s become a slur in modern times.

* * *

Lady Sybil gently lent Valentine a number of etiquette books. She said, “Your manners are quite good, you’re charming really… for someone who isn’t from here, but years will pass, and soon enough, you’ll be as from here as you are from anywhere, and it will all go more smoothly if you don’t give the proper circles any reason to catch you out.”

Valentine could have said that the proper circles weren’t his circles. He wondered if she’d ever tried to teach Vimes manners, and he decided that she probably had, many times, to no avail. Now, it wasn’t that Valentine minded manners. Properly applied, they showed respect, and an armed society had to be a polite society.

The problem was that, reading through the etiquette books, of which _Lady Deirdre Waggon’s Book of Etiquette_ was the first and foremost, Valentine could see how silly it was. If someone knew the correct fork to use for fish all that it meant was that person had grown up in a household rich enough to pass down arcane knowledge of forking. Besides, Valentine had very little personal use for forks, anyway. No, high society manners were just a way for aristos to identify other aristos and sneer at folks who grew up with hungry bellies for not knowing that a lady could never have more than one glass of champagne.56

Sure, it was all just rules, ridiculous and arbitrary rules, and Valentine could play along. He just knew that if he played along, he wouldn’t get any thanks for it. He was always going to be the other. If he didn’t play along, yes, he supposed it would make life more difficult. But some silly rules wouldn’t make it easier. They’d make it less difficult. There was a difference.

Lady Sybil sometimes asked Valentine to spar with her, which had its own set of etiquette. While she didn’t exactly like weapons, she’d practised the broadsword since she was a gel. Valentine had a short sword that he didn’t know how to use, because when it came to policing, he preferred his words, and he was good with them, and if things had gotten to a situation where his only option was force, first off, he’d failed, but second off, his truncheon did the trick.

So sparring was never going to be a fair fight, and it was made somewhat less fair by the fact that Lady Sybil was a dame on the straight and narrow, and Valentine was just constitutionally unable to sucker punch a dame on the straight and narrow. If he could have fought dirty, oh, maybe he could have made their sparring interesting, but no, Valentine just couldn’t do that, not to Sam’s wife.

Unfortunately, Lady Sybil didn’t take the same attitude towards him.

But then, broads with broadswords weren’t really supposed to fight men with shortswords, unless they were Hublands princesses, in which case the men with shortswords weren’t supposed to survive to complain about it.

It was funny, the lapses in etiquette one could get away when one was rich enough that one couldn’t be crazy, merely eccentric.

In the end, it was all jolly good calisthenics, at least for Sybil, and it wasn’t like she’d ever ask her Sam. Valentine might not fight dirty, if he sparred with her, but her Sam wouldn’t fight at all. He was too worshipful, and in any case, he kept himself busy with work.

56 [Of course,](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a9202100/victorian-etiquette-rules/) the leisure classes [of Roundworld](https://www.bustle.com/articles/123564-7-bizarre-etiquette-rules-from-the-past) also once followed [many,](https://www.playbuzz.com/melbailey11/10-victorian-etiquette-rules-that-seem-ridiculous-now) many, [many,](https://www.rd.com/list/tips-from-old-etiquette-books/) many, [many norms](https://bestlifeonline.com/etiquette-rules/) that seem odd by today’s standards, but to be fair, no doubt in the future some norms that we are all familiar with will come across as quaint and absurd. _“Can you **believe** people used to go around without masks, **breathing** on each other and letting themselves get identified by facial recognition software?”_

* * *

“He looks like you,” Valentine said, apropos of nothing, when it was 2 AM and the wind was blowing freezing rain.

It was just a patrol. Discounting the weather, all was possibly well, at least, all that could be seen walking the length of Broadway. Inside the Palace, for example, there were assuredly things that were unwell, but no one had made enough noise to give them cause to investigate.

Vimes whipped his head around, trying to see whom Valentine meant, but the people on the road were the same people he’d seen before, and there weren’t too many of them. Sensible, in this weather.

“Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes,” Valentine added, absently, looking at the statue.

Ah, yes, the statue. It was leaned against the wall, head down as it lit a stone cigar, out of the wind, at the top of Broadway, across from the Palace. Next to the statue, propped up against the wall, was a carved stone axe. Perhaps the axe looked like the one that was embedded in the table in the Rat Chamber. The statue’s uniform was very old-fashioned, appropriate for the time, but pieces of it here and there showed up on modern Watchmen, who were always just sent down to the Armoury to find whatever fit. 

Despite the bitter cold, Vimes’s ears reddened. “Uhm. Yes. I’m told my ears take more after Gramma Clamp, though…”

It was a stupid thing to say, but it wasn’t, _Oh yes, that’s the statue that Vetinari had put up when he had me made a Duke and had the historians clear the family name, because I’m bought and sold, just like that._

“Hell of a first name,” said Valentine, brushing the ice off the plaque, which read:

_Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes_  
_“Old Stoneface”_  
_The Watch Commander who decided that though a King may be above the Law, he was not above Justice._  
_He did the job before him, not because he had to, but because no one else would do it._

“It was the style at the time,” Vimes said quietly.

“I’ve heard folks call you ‘Old Stoneface’, too, although not usually to your face,” said Valentine.

Vimes shrugged. People did. He heard, anyway.

“It’s even on the family crest,” said Valentine, “A marble bust. A face of stone.”

The crest that was resurrected by Vetinari as a little ‘well done’, a little pat on the back. _Bought and sold..._

“I’ll have to get used to it. Marrying you, it’ll be my crest, too,” said Valentine, finally moving off, away from the statue. “A face of stone, a fasces, some grape vines, and a crown with a sword through it.”

“It’s just a bunch of puns,” Vimes said gloomily. “I regret inflicting it on you, like some embarrassing disease. That, and a title, too. Marquess. You’ll be in for it, there. I’m sure there’ll be plumes.”

Valentine smiled at him, and he said, “I’ll live.”

* * *

“You know, a few years back, even the waltz was considered scandalous, but that’s all blown over now, and good thing, too, because a waltz is about all that Sam can manage, dear soul,” said Sybil, sitting in the back of her coach.

Valentine sat across from her. The coach didn’t move any faster than traveling on foot. It was possibly a bit slower, given Ankh-Morpork’s perennial traffic problem. Taking a coach just meant that they didn’t have to walk or interact with anyone they ran into. For Valentine, this was not an advantage. He sighed, “Y’know, your ladyship, Sam seems like he ought to be able to dance…”

Anyone who had the grace and agility for rooftop battles ought to be able to dance.

Lady Sybil and Valentine shared a look. They both knew Sam. There was incompetence, and then there was deliberate incompetence.

Lady Sybil continued delicately, “In any case, he doesn’t like the leaping country dances.”

Valentine mumbled, “I could really go for a lindy hop, but I don’t know that this world has it or if it ever will, your ladyship.” Ankh-Morpork had some jazz, oddly enough. What it had or did not have was impossible to predict. It was like a kleptomaniac had gone on a rampage through time.

“I cannot say I have heard of such a thing,” said Lady Sybil. “I should still like for you to learn the Sto Plains county dance, cotillion, quadrille, Pseudopolis reel, Strip the Widow, and, of course the Gay Gordon -”

Valentine couldn’t help a snort.

“I daresay that means something different to you than it does to me?” Lady Sybil inquired.

“You could say that, your ladyship,” said Valentine, covering his smile with a hand.

Lady Sybil looked at him narrowly. “Even if Sam doesn’t prefer those dances, you ought to know them, because there will be other society events.”

It was bold of her to assume that he’d be invited to society events and that, if he was invited, anyone would condescend to dance with him.

Knack & Teddy’s Celebrated Academy for Ballroom and Modern Dancing57 was on the corner of Knack and Teddy and Old New Lane. The proprietors were Misses Quick and Glowberry. Valentine noted that they didn’t have classes on the full moon, and he wondered if they were concerned about werewolf clients or if, perhaps, either Miss Quick, Miss Glowberry, or both might be werewolves themselves. The sign did make a note that troll students were accepted.

In any case, whatever they were, Misses Quick and Glowberry were happy to see Lady Sybil and perhaps not to see her dance partner, although they were trying to be polite because Lady Sybil was the richest woman in the city.

Learning a new dance wasn’t hard. It was all just executing a pattern with a little spatial awareness thrown in.

Oh, but he made Lady Sybil smile, didn’t he? Looked like Valentine wasn’t the only one who wished that Sam could dance. In any case, he ended up with another set of dance lessons with Lady Sybil blocked into his calendar.

57 [They even offer waltzing for trolls!](http://jaylyn.hypermart.net/vvart/knackteddy.jpg)

* * *

“Hey, you’re a bird-watcher of two kinds, right?” asked Nobby.

“Uh?” said Valentine, who was finishing up his end of shift paperwork.

“Cocks and tits?” clarified Nobby.

Valentine groaned. “Uhm. Yes, actually. I’m, uh… I’m glad you’re actually able to understand that.” Folks had _such_ difficulty understanding that Valentine was bisexual. He swore, date one guy, and people thought you were gay forever. Vimes was nice, but Valentine sure wasn’t gonna swear off dames with legs for days over him.

Nobby looked relieved. “Oh, good. Well, we’re going to the Pink PussyCat Club, then.”

“We’re doing what?” asked Valentine, feeling alarmed. He became aware that, aside from Flavours sitting on his shoulder, that Hrolf Thighbiter, Bauxite, and Obie Fleming (a Lance-Constable originally from the Chalk), were looking at him and Nobby with some interest, and the door outside had just opened.

“Stag night! Your last night of freedom!” said Nobby, putting his hands wide in the air.

The door admitted DiMA, who said, “I suspect the term ‘bachelor party’ might be more familiar, given Nick’s lexicon.”

Feeling set-up, Valentine demanded of Nobby, “You got my brother in on this?”

But behind DiMA, there was Preston Garvey, and Valentine stood, walked over, and clapped Garvey on the arm, beaming. “Preston! I haven’t seen you in months!”

Deacon followed Garvey in and took up a post leaning casually along the wall.

Garvey hugged him back. “I’m just glad I made it back in time for your wedding.”

“Hey, you Minutemen can make it anywhere in a minute, right?” said Valentine, who couldn’t feel more delighted.

“Well, definitely for you, Nick,” said Garvey. “Congratulations.”

“And Preston, that guy over there is Deacon,” said Valentine.

Upon being pointed out, Deacon gave the impression of rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses.

“Wow, new face!” said Garvey, doing a double-take.

“Hmm. Yeah. The face-stealer got me. It happens,” said Deacon.

Garvey nodded in sympathy. “Oh yeah, those. One of them almost got one of the other Grand Trunk guards recently.”

Valentine turned back to the curious onlookers, “This is my good friend Preston Garvey. We go way back,” to a design folder in some wizard’s desk, anyway. Then he looked back to Garvey and pointed to the rat on his shoulder and introduced, “Preston, this is Artificial Flavours. He’s an Educated Rodent. We work a beat together pretty commonly.”

Flavours waved a paw and greeted, “Hi, there!”

Then Valentine realized that he didn’t think that Flavours had ever really met DiMA, so he said, “Oh, and yeah, that’s my brother, DiMA.”

“Heard of him,” said Flavours, slightly grinning.

“Of course I got your brother in on this!” said Nobby, apparently offended. “What do you take me for, an amateur?”

“I didn’t know ‘bachelor partier’ was a profession,” said Valentine dryly, and he gave in. He was outnumbered and surrounded. He finished up his paperwork and let them walk him away.

“Well, of course!” huffed Nobby. “It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to get stinking drunk while enduring an onslaught of lap dances.”

“Does your girlfriend know?” asked Valentine. It was common knowledge in the Watch that Nobby was practically married to a goblin maiden.

“Sometimes she comes with me,” said Nobby. “She likes the chicken wings.”

Bauxite and Thighbiter, weirdly, came with the mismatched group. Trolls had their own strip clubs, where the women put on more clothes rather than taking clothing off. Trolls were very temperature sensitive, and the more clothing they wore, the more they overheated, and the slower their brains worked. For some reason, the average troll man got hot off the idea of watching troll women get stupider? Valentine didn’t know; it was Cultural. Dwarfs, on the other hand, liked to wear about 12 layers at default and to keep whatever was under them a mystery.

So he asked, “And what are you two getting out of this?”

Bauxite and Thighbiter looked at each other and then back at him and said about the same time, “Gossip.”

_Ah._

Obie Fleming, the Lance-Constable from the Chalk, also tagged along, and he asked of Nobby, “So you’re really just taking him to a strip club?”

“Yeah, I get in free, on account of being buds with one of the senior dancers,” said Nobby. “Me ‘n Tawneee go way back.”

“Huh, y’know, back on the Chalk, we’d get him filthy drunk -” started Fleming.

Valentine raised a finger and corrected, “I can't get drunk.”

Fleming said, “Well, that would make the rest of it difficult, because the next part is we take you a long way away, tie you to a tree, and then a bucket of paint and a brush are involved, and we throw you in a pigsty.”

“Yeah. Uh. The Pink PussyCat Club sounds great, really,” said Valentine, feeling a mild horror when he thought about how difficult he was to clean in the context of Chalk stag nights.

“Don't get drunk, huh?” said Thighbiter, speculatively.

“Y’know, we’ve got this stuff called scumble -” started Fleming.

“I prefer the Blue Cat Club,” said DiMA.

Valentine started, “I’ve tried scumble, and no, it doesn’t get me drunk, but it does corrode metal. You try needing to patch your insides! I ain’t doing that again, and - DiMA, why were you _at_ the Blue Cat Club?”

“Some of my… friends go there, from time to time, and having a sober companion to walk them home is of use to them,” said DiMA, shrugging, “but the Pink PussyCat Club is haunted by Professor Flead, and if I tip his favourite ecdysiast for him, he’ll sometimes provide interesting historical perspectives on magic.”

Valentine struggled to deal with the fact that not only did his brother DiMA go to strip clubs, but he apparently went to strip clubs because he could get test answers that way.

The Pink PussyCat Club was, well, a strip-club. Lithe, bronzed bodies spun through the air with all the grace and poise that a Vertibird did not possess. One of the dancers, in her late twenties, early thirties, could have been one of those forgotten discredited gods, those false idols, who walked the Shades. Nobby waved cheerily to her and greeted, “Tawneee!”

Valentine scanned the place, and saw, off at a table, Sally and Piper, who giggled as Valentine arrived, escorted by his motley crew. Piper appeared genuinely surprised and said, “Nicky, I didn’t know you’d be here!”

Sally, however, was smirking, and everyone knew how coppers gossiped.

“I bet she did, though,” said Valentine, indicating Sally.

“The Pink PussyCat Club’s a perfectly reasonable date night location,” said Sally innocently, leaning against Piper.

Valentine found himself sitting down in the front row, next to Nobby, with Garvey on his other side. Deacon sat down behind Valentine. Fleming sat to the other side of Nobby. Bauxite and Thighbiter stayed in the back, being there to watch whatever happened with Valentine and having no interest in scantily clad human women.

Seat seven, centre row, was empty, but DiMA walked behind there, to seat seven, second row, and started talking to the empty seat in front of him. Valentine had _thought_ DiMA was being flowery with his language when he said the Pink PussyCat Club was ‘haunted’ by Professor Flead, but he was forced to confront the possibility that DiMA might have meant that haunting literally.

Someone handed Valentine a cocktail menu.58

 **Sex with an Alligator:** raspberry liqueur, melon liqueur, sweet & sour mix, digestif

 **Just Sex:** Wahlulu coffee liqueur, peach schnapps, lemon gin, Bearhugger’s cherry whiskey, ice, lemonade

 **Sit on my Face:** Wahlulu coffee liqueur, hazelnut liqueur, Bearhugger’s cream whiskey

 **Frozen Pink Panties:** gin, frozen pink lemonade, frozen strawberries, crushed ice, vanilla ice cream

 **Pussy Galore:** Bearhugger’s whiskey, red vermouth, creme de menthe, maraschino, Branca Menta, bitters, orange peel

 **No Brainer:** rum, lime juice, cinnamon syrup, kumquat halves

Fleming leaned over Nobby to look at the menu in Valentine’s hands and declared, “I’d like a Pussy Galore.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” said another patron, who thought he was being funny.

Thighbiter squeezed up between Deacon and the back of Valentine’s chair to look at the menu and said speculatively, “You said you don’t get drunk, right?”

“I mean I _can’t_ ,” said Valentine.

“Prove it. Get the man one of everything!” said Thighbiter. Dwarfs were a serious people, and they took drinking very, very seriously, indeed.

That was always how these things started. Why it ended with Deacon commandeering a cart, Nobby stopping into the grocery to buy some tomatoes, Garvey leaping rooftop to rooftop, Fleming being tied over the shark tank in the Patrician’s menagerie, Bauxite in a dress, Flavours in a dance contest with the Ninja Morris Men, Thighbiter stuck up on the dome of the Temple of Small Gods, and DiMA having the repair the magic sign of the Saturnalia Casino, Valentine would have been hard-pressed to explain. Of course, none of that would have happened if he had not gone chasing after the Mysterious Stranger, but he was Nick Valentine. He was always going to chase the Mysterious Stranger.

But no one painted him or dumped him in a pigsty, and Bearhugger’s cherry whiskey was actually really tasty.

58 [A quality strip-club](https://joyenergizer.com/20-dirty-named-cocktails/) such as [the Pink Pussy-Cat](https://www.cocktailbuilder.com/recipe/just-sex) would no doubt [stock their menu](https://www.supercall.com/recipe/frozen-pink-panties) only with the classiest [sex-themed cocktails.](https://bertouxbrandy.com/cocktail/no-brainer-2/)

* * *

DiMA was the very first to arrive on the morning of the wedding, narrowly beating out Lady Sybil only because he actually lived at the Unseen University, and he’d gone back home straightaway after repairing the magic sign of the Saturnalia Casino. They’d had rehearsals. He was vaguely aware of how everything was supposed to go. He’d practised his speech. Weddings were _scripted_.

But, upon hearing that DiMA was going to be best man, Alf had explained a Sto Plains tradition: if the groom didn’t show, the best man was expected to fill in, which meant that, until Valentine showed up, DiMA grappled with the vague horror that he might have to marry Sam Vimes. Vimes wasn’t DiMA’s type, even if wizards weren’t expected to be celibate.

Lady Sybil and her coterie of helpers were the next to arrive. As DiMA assisted them with setting up, he contemplated what would happen if neither Vimes nor Valentine showed up. Would he have to marry Sybil? He liked her well enough, but he wasn’t even attracted to women.

But Valentine showed up. DiMA knew that Valentine had probably needed to go dump out his tank after the stag night, anyway; clear liquids and ethanol weren’t too hard on the holding tank, but Valentine had drunk _many_ frozen blended beverages.

In the wedding rehearsals, Valentine had worn a rather sharp dark grey pinstriped suit. Now, for the actual wedding, Valentine was wearing a tailed frock coat, which was probably supposed to be mulberry or claret but looked more magenta. His waistcoat was purple - Lady Sybil had made a sideways comment that Valentine certainly wasn’t entitled to wear white. His trousers were royal blue doeskin. A fresh hot pink rose was in his lapel.

The best man and groomsmen were supposed to wear similar outfits, in more subdued colours, but wizards were a lore unto themselves. DiMA was entitled to a pointy hat, so he was going to wear it.

* * *

Valentine felt jittery and useless, and he was sure he looked ridiculous, a toaster tarted up like a popinjay. Lady Sybil and her interchangeable Emmas had everything handled, and what they didn’t have handled, DiMA insisted on doing because, “I live here. If I don’t know where something is, it has probably been dragged off into nameless dimensions of torment, and in that case, I may as well proceed down to the store and purchase a new one.”

Some guests started to file in. Vimes’s second wedding was, in a sense, a bigger to-do than his first. Lady Sybil was the highest born lady in Ankh-Morpork, yes, but when Vimes had married Lady Sybil, he’d been only Captain Vimes and soon to be the retired Mr. Vimes. He hadn’t been Sir Samuel, the knight in sour armour. He certainly hadn’t been the Duke of Ankh. The Blackboard Monitor had been there, albeit unrecognized. 

But now the Duke of Ankh was occasioning to make an honest synth out of the one he’d pulled out of Vault 114, and the Duke of Ankh was known across the Disc. He was the right-hand man of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. He’d arrested armies. He’d brokered the Koom Valley Accords. The Duke of Ankh could have said he was marrying a small vase of flowers, and the world would have watched.

Lady Sybil’s invite list was a fearsome thing. Most of her invites had been for political reasons. Some had refused outright, often with florid responses. Some were more passive-aggressive. Some had been flat denials. The worst of all, in Lady Sybil’s book, were those who did not reply at all.

Some had sent polite declinations; many heads of state and other notables were genuinely busy. Low Queen Blodwen Rhysdottir had her new child to attend to, for example. The politest of declinations were often accompanied by gifts, which were now piled up, awaiting Valentine and Vimes. Nick was rather goggled at all the gifts that Vimes was getting just for being Vimes. Valentine was always uncomfortable about gifts. He felt that he didn’t deserve them, and that went double for gifts that were jointly his solely because of his fiance. These people didn’t know him from Adam. 

Baron Roland de Chumsfanleigh of the Chalk had not replied at all; someone wasn’t going on Lady Sybil’s Hogswatch card list.

Chirm also had not replied, but Lady Sybil said that country was nothing but a pack of bandits and pirates.

The People's Beneficent Republic of Agatea had an embassy in Ankh-Morpork, and they’d sent the very polite suggestion that Vimes and Valentine should be imprisoned for deviancy.

Borogravia had the official stance that Valentine and Vimes were an abomination unto Nuggan, although the country was still in the continuous process of dismantling Nuggan worship, and their _P.S._ was that they really, truly did not want Vimes the Butcher to come visit.

Llamedos sent a letter stating in no uncertain terms that both Sam Vimes and Nick Valentine needed to be sacrificed to the old gods, their entrails scattered to the winds.

Pseudopolis sent a terse reply that they both ought to be hung.

Fourecks sent an official letter of disapproval, but the organizers of the Galah sent an unofficial letter that could be summarized as ‘right on’.

The Seriphate of Klatch sent a few different response letters, with different shades of outrage, confusion, and guarded congratulations. In addition, a Klatchian policeman called 71-hour Ahmed, who seemed to have a history with Vimes, sent a wry letter wondering what Nick Valentine had done that was so egregious that Sam Vimes felt the personal need to put a ball and chain on him.

Omnia sent a dozen letters, each expressing a different opinion, but Visit showed up, mainly to say that he was disappointed that Vimes and Valentine hadn’t gotten married _sooner_.

Queen Ptraci of Djelibeybi sent a thoughtful set of miniature pyramids.

Queen Ella Saturday of Genua sent a polite not-attending letter and some dried prawns.

Hersheba, a small country self-aware enough to know it was underdeveloped and vulnerable to more powerful foreign interests, sent along some of their Hershebars, a highly calorific sweetmeat designed to sustain travellers on long journeys, as a gesture of placation.

Skund sent a basket of suspiciously mellow mushrooms. Valentine suspected that he and Vimes would be quietly giving that basket to Cheery for drug testing.

Her Supreme Majesty, Queen Kelirehenna I, Lord of Sto Lat, Protector of the Eight Protectorates and Empress of the Long Thin Debated Piece Hubwards of Sto Kerrig, attempted to send Her Grace, the Duchess of Sto Helit, Lady Susan Sto Helit, who had politely responded that she was busy grading papers. There was a box of Wienrich and Boettcher chocolates on the gift tables, though, tagged as being gifted from Sto Helit and footnoted: _Sorry for the nougat._

Sto Kerrig, contrary to its supposed Empress, sent another letter to the tune that Vimes and Valentine ought instead be kicked in the nougat.

King Verence and Queen Magrat Garlick of Lancre were too busy to personally attend, but Queen Magrat sent a basket of healing crystals, potions, salves, and protective jewellery. DiMA would have been drooling over the crystals, if he could drool. He was already going on about his personal theory that Witchcraft and Wizard’s Magic were not polar opposites but existed within a lumpy spectral cloud. Valentine, knowing how Vimes felt about magic, had mentally earmarked the crystals as something to re-gift to DiMA at the earliest opportunity.

The Low Queen of Dwarfs sent a loaf of battle bread. Valentine didn’t know if that was a congratulations or a threat.

Diamond, King of Trolls, sent a Thud! board, with the recommendation that Vimes teach it to his groom.

Lady Margolotta of High Uberwald sent a nervous looking vampire as her ambassador who placed on the gift table something very clever made of clockwork that Valentine had to immediately hide in a box before the children could see it.

Ephebe not only sent a set of urns depicting… mythic situations, definitely mythic, which Valentine rotated around such that young Sam and Shaun and Nat wouldn’t see them. Ephebe also sent some cheery ambassadors, who were sincerely congratulatory to Valentine. “It’s always a lovely thing when a monster finds a hero to carry him off, and men are much better intellectual conversationalists than women.”

Valentine wasn’t quite sure how to take that combination of cheery xenophilia, acceptance of bisexuality, and misogyny.

Tsort, not to be outdone by Ephebe, sent a wooden horse with their ambassadors hiding inside, ready to jump out when the cake was cut. Valentine thought more than a few wires were crossed, there.

A barbarian princess from the Hublands just happened to be in town buying some retribushium at Shatta. While she hadn’t been explicitly invited, she had decided that a ducal wedding was a right and proper place for a princess to be. She commented that it was about time that someone was doing the right thing and marrying not only the evil wizard’s beautiful daughter but also the evil wizard’s arcane creation. Anyone who was carried off from an evil wizard’s lair deserved equal treatment, didn’t they?

Valentine didn’t think that he was an _evil_ wizard’s creation, exactly, putting the issue of the Institute aside.

The Ankh-Morpork ambassador from Istanzia showed up with a gift of a book on Umnian golems, looking quite terrified. Valentine had to wonder - what the Hell did Sam Vimes do to these people, because he must have done _something._

Lord Rodley, His Grace, the Duke of Quirm, sent an angry not-attending letter, but his mother, Lady Brenda Rodley, Her Grace, the Dowager Duchess, a small, spry woman in rubber boots with a whiff of the chemical draconic scent about her, had shown up and walked straight up to Lady Sybil and said that it would really be no trouble to arrange an Assassin.

Before Valentine could say anything, Lady Sybil said calmly, “Brenda, I don’t suppose you’ve heard what our Mr. Valentine did with the last three Assassins sent after him? And in any case, I’m quite fond of him and would be most wroth if anything were to happen to him. He does a splendid job of looking after my Sam.”

Lady Brenda looked from Lady Sybil to Valentine, and it appeared that an understanding dawned upon her. “You had written, of course, but well… writing. I see that you _are_ fond of him. Oh, I am most dismayed. It is entirely too late to purchase a proper nuptial gift.”

“Oh, now that's not necessary. I'm just glad that you’re here, your Grace,” said Valentine, offering a slight bow. He knew that he didn’t need to; he wasn’t a citizen of Quirm, and he didn’t particularly _want_ to, insofar as the woman had been talking about having him assassinated, but he wouldn’t have it be said that Nick Valentine lacked manners.

“Isn’t he charming?” said Lady Brenda, to Lady Sybil.

“Yes, he rather is,” Lady Sybil agreed.

Of Ankh-Morpork itself, quite a lot of the social elite had snubbed the wedding, and some of the attendees were clearly only there on sufferance. They weren’t there because they approved. They were there to see and be seen. 

They were there because Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork was there, a coterie of veteran and worried guards around him. Valentine was given to understand that the Patrician had acquired the need for his cane at Vimes’s wedding to Lady Sybil, and he suspected that the Patrician was not in a hurry to receive any new injuries. Valentine had never met the Patrician, and he was surprised when the Patrician flagged down DiMA, who was in the middle of constructing pylons. Why, precisely, Valentine and Vimes’s wedding required pylons, he wasn’t sure, but Lady Sybil wasn’t stopping DiMA, so he assumed that DiMA was, indeed, supposed to be assembling pylons.

The Patrician asked, with a certain air of familiarity, “And how do your studies progress?”

“Well, m’lord,” DiMA said stiffly, his posture guarded. “The Nontraditional Students’ Association has obtained Professor Ladislav Pelc, the Prehumous Professor of Morbid Bibliomancy, as our advisor, and we have further expanded our membership.”

“It progresses, it progresses,” said the Patrician, nodding, as if what DiMA said was not unexpected. “If you could introduce me to your brother? We have not met.”

Had DiMA been holding his staff the whole time? Valentine didn’t remember it being in his hand. DiMA inclined his head slightly and offered, “Constable Nick Valentine, please meet Lord Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.”

“Good morning, my lord,” said Valentine, bowing formally, because in this case, he had to.

“They say you went through self-recursive tunnels underneath the Unseen University, broke into a locked location, foiled a plot to blow up Ankh-Morpork, and took a crossbow bolt for His Grace,” said the Patrician, studying Valentine.

“Not really sure who ‘they’ would be, sir,” said Valentine, grimacing, though he had the scar on his forehead to prove it, if anyone could distinguish it from any of his other scars.

“It occurs to me that you have never been thanked for your service to the city,” the Patrician observed.

There was a look of what was best described as dawning horror in DiMA’s optics. 

Valentine said stiffly, “I don’t require thanks, sir.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t, if you’re His Grace’s type. Then please allow me to offer you my congratulations on this day,” said the Patrician, who moved off to speak with Lady Sybil.

The Selachiis, Venturis, Eorles, Rusts, Skaters, Omniuses, Remoras, and many other notable families pointedly did not attend. The Kings did. Lady Euphemia King would never miss a chance to out-ballgown the rest of the city, and out-ballgown she did. Indeed, the wedding of two men was a wedding where it was safe to out-ballgown, as it contained precisely zero brides to offend.

Sir Josiah Boggis, the President of the Thieves’ Guild, also attended, with his wife and his bodyguards as his plus one, plus two, plus three. Ankh-Morpork had hundreds of Guilds, and of them, perhaps a few dozen Guild leaders attended. Mr. Rudolf Potts of the Bakers’ Guild was there and very, very pleased with himself.

There were wizards all over the place. There would be, even if the wedding wasn’t in their Great Hall. Wizards just showed up at weddings, an instinctive gravitation to free food. DiMA seemed to know many of them.

Aside from Visit, many, many Watchmen attended. Apparently, they were supposed to form up making an arch with their shortswords that Vimes and Valentine would then walk through, but some of them had brought axes or clubs or, in one case, a set of bagpipes, instead of their shortswords, so that was going to be interesting.

Carrot came because, even if he didn’t exactly approve on grounds of Tradition, he went way back with Vimes, which meant that Angua came with Carrot. Sally, however, had already RSVP’d as Piper’s plus one. Colon and Detritus also went way back with Vimes. 

This meant that Haddock was in charge of the Yard.

One could pay off the Beggars’ Guild to prevent them from gracing a wedding, but there was no way of preventing Nobby Nobbs from attending. He’d almost gotten the tomato stains out of his outfit, although the tomato stains were an upgrade over the rest of it. Artificial Flavours was there, too, and Dorfl, and dozens of Watchmen who’d been successful in begging off duty to come to the wedding as ‘security’. They were doing a lovely job of securing the canapes in their stomachs.

Then there were Valentine’s people.

Piper was trying to get news stories from the various dignitaries, and Sally was following her, amused and occasionally reigning Piper in when she became too overbearing in her interview attempts. Nat was mostly sticking with Shaun and Sam; not many other children were present. Piper and Nat had collectively gifted Valentine and Vimes with one of Nat’s drawings of a cat and a rocketship, because, Piper said, the political cartoons cost too much for her to buy an original of one of them.

Playing down his hangover, Deacon was mingling with _everyone._ He dropped off a small package on the gift table, wrapped in a newspaper sheet that, even used as wrapping, Valentine could tell had been a political cartoon of Vimes. Valentine remembered that one. By the general shape of the wrapped item, he could guess what it probably was. If Deacon didn’t like to live dangerously, he sure gave that impression.

Garvey, also hungover, gave Valentine a tight hug. He’d brought some smoked herring and herring beer from Hergen and something that was of great interest to Lady Sybil: a blurred iconograph of something very, very big with bat-like wings roosting atop a clacks tower. 

Codsworth was handing out tiny watercress sandwiches and occasional surprise glasses of fresh water. 

Pearlie the Seamstress came, with her cat, and she happily informed Valentine that she’d been talking to the foreign dignitaries and already had six clients lined up for the night.

There were some barkeeps he knew. Valentine had made a few other friends and acquaintances in Ankh-Morpork. 

There were two neat boxes, one for him and one for Vimes, tagged as being from DiMA. Valentine’s box was smaller. Both were tagged ‘do not shake’. Shaun and Nat tried to sneak over to shake Valentine’s box, but young Sam warned, “I wouldn’t do that.”

Nat tried, anyway, and then yelped and pulled back as if she’d received a static shock. She looked to young Sam for an explanation.

He admitted shyly, “There’s magic on both those boxes.”

“How come you can see magic and I can’t?” said Shaun.

“Probably because Father didn’t know I can see magic when you were made,” said young Sam.

Valentine felt that he’d seen a ghost when he saw an old hunter in the crowd. 

“Hey metal man,” said Longfellow, vaguely.

“Where did you _go_?” exclaimed Valentine.

“Fourecks,” said Longfellow, taking one of Garvey’s herring beers.

“I was uh, gonna go there myself, actually,” admitted Valentine.

“It was a bit of an accident,” said Longfellow. “I fell asleep on a ship, and next I knew, we were underway. I think I’ll stay there, though. Got some decent hunting. I just came back for the wedding. Hitched a ride with some of the Lady’s friends.”

He pointed out a woman who looked a little bit older than Lady Sybil, who was accompanied by two deeply tanned, identical-looking men. The trio were currently talking with Lady Sybil, looking to be reminiscing over old times.

“What have you been up to?” asked Valentine.

“Aside from hunting? Some beer-running, some cart-driving…” He broke into a grin. “I keep myself busy.”

A dignitary from a county Valentine swore was made-up accosted him, and he had to spend a moment trying to decide if the woman was Deacon in disguise. Valentine felt overwhelmed, trying to talk to everyone, most of them strangers, and be polite and _likeable_.

And more people were pouring in. Valentine was starting to be concerned about space. Lady Sybil brushed it off with a cheerful, “Oh no, I asked Mustrum about that,” and she had a few words with DiMA.

DiMA had a few words with a few of his classmates, and he went back to his pylons. The Great Hall unfolded. A blink, and suddenly, there was four times as much room as there had been prior. People were still where they were; there was just more space between them. DiMA explained, “Controlled recursion and aim-driven unfolding,” which didn’t explain anything, “We have 14.14 hours.”

That was more than enough time for the wedding, although Valentine was getting antsy that Vimes wasn’t there yet. Still, he had to ask, “What happens if we go past 14.14 hours?”

DiMA toyed nervously with the hem of his sleeve. “Then 14.14 hours goes _through_ us and has to come back out. Uhm. Mister Stibbons thinks.”

When it was fifteen to noon and Valentine hadn’t heard word of Vimes arriving, his low-level worries flipped into high gear. What if Vimes didn’t show? What if something had happened to him? What if he didn’t really want to come? What if he stood Valentine up at the podium?

Valentine restlessly paced over to the windows until he found one where he could watch the clacks. He became aware, peripherally, that the Patrician was looking at him as he looked out the window, although the Patrician stepped away to ask DiMA something almost as soon as Valentine noticed him.

The clacks chatter was mainly society gossip, in addition to the usual Guild, shipping, and other economic messages. Lady Sybil, who had been engaged in pleasant conversation with half a dozen women her age, came to him at five minutes ‘till and put her hand on his shoulder. “He ended up late to our wedding, too, but then, it was, ah, rather complicated.”

“I heard that was how the Patrician ended up needing a cane,” Valentine said, distantly.

“Yes. It was a dreadful business, but our Sam got the scofflaw in the end,” said Sybil, with pride. “You ought to come back off to the side now.”

“Y’really think Sam seeing me in this getup before the wedding is bad luck?” asked Valentine, who would have been happy to see Vimes at all.

“I think you and our Sam ought not be taking chances,” said Sybil mildly, as she walked him to where he was to stand off to the side until it was time to come back out.

So Valentine waited with DiMA, and he fretted. Ankh-Morpork started to hit noon, slowly, as it did, first with the bells of the Teachers’ Guild, then the gong of Small Gods, the tinkling carillon of the Fools’ Guild, the black bell of Fate, the cacophony of all the temples and guilds, the measured silences of Old Tom, the silence echoing in Valentine’s head, so close up, and finally, after the silence ended, the strike of the Assassins’ Guild.

Valentine’s spirits fell. DiMA awkwardly put his hand on Valentine’s shoulder. Valentine leaned into him, and he would have cried if he could. He wondered if Lady Sybil had cried when Vimes was late for her. Maybe nobility taught their daughters a trick of not crying, to spare their makeup. He wouldn’t know.

At the five minute mark, DiMA asked quietly, “Is this like lectures? If Commander Vimes is fifteen minutes late, you have to marry Lady Sybil instead?”

Valentine stared at him.

It was around the fifteen minute mark when Vimes limped in. He was in his dress uniform, with the gold and silver leaf and hammered tracing disguising good steel, having insisted that he’d rather show up naked than wear his Ducal regalia, and that was not an empty threat from Sam Vimes. Valentine hadn’t seen him in his dress uniform before. Vimes mostly wore it for parades and other official ceremonial business. He looked like… well, he was a man who could make a breastplate look rumpled. But he was still a knight, and the armour was reasonably shiny.

The butterflies rattling around inside landed, and Valentine smiled.

Lady Sybil descended on Vimes to fuss over him, but Vimes insisted, “Just a sprained ankle, I’m sure.”

She pulled out a stimpack from her voluminous yards of blue skirt and demanded, “Give me your arm, Sam.”

“I gave you that in case you or the children were injured!” Vimes protested. “Do you know how expensive it is to make more of them?”

“You gave it to me, and now it is mine, and I am choosing to use it on you,” said Lady Sybil, shaking her head as if Vimes had personally chosen to break his ankle to annoy her. “Limping at your own wedding. What happened, dear?”

Vimes ceded and gave her his arm. “Oh, nothing unusual…”

* * *

Sergeant Haddock was in charge of Pseudopolis Yard, with his intrepid crew of Watchmen who had been unable to beg off to go watch the wedding and eat the free food. There had been curiously little crime so far that day. It was as if the criminal element had collectively decided that it did not want to attract the attention of Commander Sam Vimes on his wedding day.

Then said Commander Sam Vimes staggered in, dragging a youth gang member with cauliflower ears and a cabbage smell. He said calmly, “The Blue Warthog gang decided that it objected to my taste in men. Or rather, to the fact that I have a taste in men. If you could drop him in a cell, get him a lunch, and have Carrot come around to talk to him tomorrow? Oh, and the rest of them might still be chasing me. Have fun with that.”

Haddock looked at the young man on the floor, who was gently groaning. “Yessir.”

Commander Vimes then limped away.

* * *

Vimes had spent the morning over at the Dolly Sisters Watchhouse, where he had ordered Sergeant Flint, who was in charge that day, to step aside for a bit and let Vimes work on the paperwork. It had been quiet. He’d gotten much done.

Then he’d had his incident with the Blue Warthog gang while walking over to Unseen University.

But now Vimes was here, with Sybil graciously as his Best Lady, and there Valentine was, in bloody Quirm-process fuchsia,59 Tyrian violet, and royal blue…

“I can’t wait to get you out of that outfit,” Vimes blurted.

Then he realized how that sounded, and he turned an interesting shade of fuschia, himself. There were quite a lot more people here than there’d been at his first wedding, and he didn’t recognize almost any of them, which wound his spring tighter. Vimes and Valentine walked down an archway made of Watchmen and weapons and a single bagpipe, to where Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully was waiting for them.

Ridcully droned on a bit, and eventually, he reached the part where he asked if anyone objected to the union. As it turned out, there _were_ people who objected to the marriage for reasons along the lines of Vimes and Valentine being the same sex, that it was March, their specieses, that Vimes was already married, that there wasn’t a low-fibre buffet option, that Vimes wasn’t marrying _them_ instead...

“Too bad, I’m marrying him, anyway,” Vimes said bluntly, to the objections, “and I don’t even know who you are!”

They were lucky he didn’t.

Eventually, they just got on with the vows, saying them at the same time, because the vows were the same, just with the names swapped around. If they waited for all the objections to die down, they’d be there until Grune. 

“I, Samuel Vimes, take thee, Nick Valentine, to my lawfully -”

The mention of ‘lawfully’ was not traditional for the vows, but the addition of that word had been very important to both of them.

“- wedded husband, to have and to hold fro’ this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til death us depart, if the civic powers will it ordained; and thereto I pledge thee my troth.”

Valentine concluded his vows at about the same time, and Ridcully said, “I now pronounce you man and… synthetic man. You may kiss.”

Now that was the difficult part. Vimes was not a man equipped by Nature to be comfortable with kissing in public. So he closed his eyes, thought about how _angry_ it would make people who hated them, leaned in, and kissed his Valentine.

59 [Discworld ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsine) should certainly have fuchsine by this point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** The Duke of Eorle is an early series pun (Duke of Earl, like the classic song). However, once Vimes is made a Duke, we're told that he's the highest ranked noble in Ankh. Therefore, the Duke of Eorle is not an Ankhian noble. We're told that, aside from Lancre, there are loads of little Ramtops kingdoms, which never get named. So I make the easy assumption that Eorle is a little Ramtops kingdom, and the Duke of Eorle just happens to live in Ankh-Morpork because he likes it there.
> 
> Downey's wife (who is apparently also an Assassin) is mentioned in Discworld's Assassins' Guild Diary 2000.
> 
> Hangfinger and Withering are mentioned in Snuff.
> 
> Night Watch has a young Sybil trying to take a broadsword to a time-displaced Vimes. I assume she still practises with the broadsword for the exercise, even if she doesn't like swords very much.
> 
> I Shall Wear Midnight describes the waltz as a depravity, but Snuff has Vimes mention the waltz as if it's an accepted dance, so I assume the waltz was recently considered scandalous but has gained acceptance.
> 
> Chalk stag nights are discussed in I Shall Wear Midnight.
> 
> "The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and peddlers in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle." [Equal Rites] Cockbill Street is technically in the Shades. It makes one think.
> 
> [Yep. Mulberry.](http://www.avictorian.com/weddingattire.html)
> 
>  **S** : We know from the books that the statue of Suffer-Not-Injustice is at the top of Broadway, across from the Palace, up against the wall and out of the wind and rain, because those were Vimes's requirements, and we're given the impression that Sam Vimes himself was more or less the model for the statue (what with Suffer-Not-Injustice having been dead and disgraced for long enough that not many around would be in a position to recognize him). As for the rest, we winged it.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	21. A Little Butter * Occupied Territory * Sepia * Deathclaw Bacon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Faster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVei5C2N4E&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=30&t=0s) by Within Temptation and [Jenny of Oldstones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTa1jHk1Lxc&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=30) by Florence + the Machine
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_A Little Butter * Occupied Territory * Sepia * Deathclaw Bacon_

There was a fat bonus to any Watchman who took normal duty on the Commander’s wedding day, being that most Watchmen wanted to take off to see the spectacle and eat the canapés. Strong didn’t much care about the wedding one way or the other, and the bonus was worth more to him in raw meat from the Slaughter District than the canapés were. He was vaguely aware that Mister Vimes had done _something_ with Valentine, which upset a lot of people, but as far as Strong could tell, it hadn’t made Mister Vimes weak in a fight, so Strong didn’t care.

He was on duty with Corporal Reg Shoe, who was _very_ corporeal, being a zombie and not a ghost. Strong didn’t think much of zombies, not that he thought much in general. He vaguely categorized them with the ghouls of the Commonwealth. They were spoiled meat.

Reg, though, was a bit more interesting than the average zombie, if only because of the things he said. Currently, the zombie was ranting, “I just think that everything could be a lot fairer, you know? There’s too many things in private hands that ought to belong to the public common. Take, hah, Baron King. So-called King of the Golden River. The Patrician made it a law that you _must_ pay him to take away your piss. You know who won’t pay? People too poor to. It ought to just be a public service, taking waste away. I’m not arresting a man for being too poor to pee!”

Strong grunted. He didn’t understand the exact problem, but the shape of the ranting sounded like something he could agree with. “Sharing is strength.”

“Yes, exactly! If everyone just shared the burden instead of one man getting stinking rich off of other people’s excrement, we’d all be better off. As it is, someday, some poor copper’s going to arrest someone for being too broke to piss, and it’s going to go all the way up to Mister Vimes, and then the shit will really hit the fan,” said Reg grimly, as they ambled along Moon Pond Lane. 

“Him good fighter,” said Strong. Commander Vimes was little but evil-minded. Strong had never seen a more efficiently vicious fighter. He respected that.

“Yes, he’s tireless in the fight for the rights of the people,” agreed Reg, though Strong wasn’t sure they were agreeing to the same thing. “He was the first Watch Commander to accept the differently alive, you know. And I suppose your kind.”

“Strong is super mutant,” said Strong. There were no other super mutants in Ankh-Morpork. It had rather forced him to broaden his standards for what counted as ‘his kind’. Somehow, between Commander Vimes and the patient work of Sergeant Detritus, that slot of ‘his kind’ was filled by some nebulous concept of the mostly law-abiding Ankh-Morpork public. Or at least the law-acknowledging.

“Right, and in Mister Vimes’s Watch, you can be what you are, without trying to pretend to be human-passing,” said Reg, and he frowned to himself, thinking. “I guess it’s nice that Mister Vimes can finally be what he is, too, without pretense.”

That went rather over Strong’s head. He was here to prod buttock and bust drugs. He hated drugs. They made people weak.

“People have really been dreadful about that whole business. I do feel bad for poor Constable Valentine. He’s almost a zombie, you know. Took a crossbow bolt to the head and got right back up. Shows motivation, that. Some people just don’t put in the effort. Anyway, I wish people could just understand that we’re all in this together,” sighed Reg, shaking his head.

“Yes. Share everything,” rumbled Strong. He thought that Valentine was puny and would probably die soon, but if the metal man proved him wrong, it was no skin off his nose.

* * *

Rincewind did not attend the ducal wedding. He knew a mess in the making, and that was one if there ever was. While the kitchen staff were distracted, he snuck in and grabbed some potatoes and returned to his swelteringly hot office. He spread a little butter on the potatoes. _Well done,_ Rincewind thought.

* * *

Vimes reached down and ripped a sock garter holding up a blue stocking off Valentine and threw it at Carrot, shouting, “Get married already!”

Valentine blinked at him, looking both startled and annoyed - they hadn’t rehearsed that, and now, his sock wouldn’t stay up.

Angua shouted back, “Raise my salary!”

Dwarfs were expected to buy their future spouses from their parents. Carrot’s parents must have set a tough asking price on him.

A rather piqued Valentine snatched the flower from the holder on Vimes’s breastplate and flung it aimlessly into the crowd, where it was grabbed by Corporal Nobbs and given to Shine of the Rainbow, his goblin girlfriend, who tucked it behind her long, pointed ear, beaming.

They sat down for lunch or dinner or whatever it was, and there were speeches. Valentine had some of that herring beer that Garvey brought, and Vimes had never been more glad to be a teetotaller. Archchancellor Ridcully gave a long and bombastic speech that Vimes was quite sure could be heard all the way out to the suburbs. Ye gods, but that man could shout. There was no bride and thusly no father of the bride to give a speech. Sybil, as his Best Lady, gave a lovely speech about what a wonderful addition Valentine - well, Valentine-Vimes; the deed poll paperwork for the name change had gone through - was going to be to their household.

The deed poll paperwork hadn’t gone through on the first or second tries. So Morecombe had done what they retained him for, and he had determined that there was a parish clerk who was refusing the deed poll for the name change on moral grounds. Morecombe had patiently explained that, on moral grounds, he felt that the clerk’s blood belonged in Morecombe’s stomach, but to get by in their modern city, they all had to make concessions, and he’d tapped his black ribbon. Did the clerk want Morecombe to have to take off that black ribbon?

The deed poll paperwork went through on that third try.

There were people clapping and in tears at the end of Sybil’s speech, people whom Vimes knew for a fact hated him. Sybil had that effect on people.

Next, it was DiMA’s turn to give his speech as Valentine’s Best Man, which gave Vimes a sense of icy dread in the pit of his stomach as he weighed the odds that DiMA would get up there on the podium and say something absolutely batshit. In the rehearsals, they didn’t actually go over the speeches, they just announced when the speeches would happen and then skipped them. Why couldn’t they have done that in the actual wedding, too? It was a bloody good idea.

DiMA looked over the crowd and said, “I should like to thank all of you for choosing to come. It was, I suspect, a more difficult choice than it needed to be. Your support is appreciated. There is not much that has not been said of His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Indeed, there are books on the subject, although the many fine publishing houses of Ankh-Morpork should be thanking my brother, Nick, for necessitating that they revise the section on Commander Vimes's personal life and thusly release new editions." DiMA had the slightest hint of a wry smile. "It has already been well remarked upon that Commander Vimes is one of the earliest, most outspoken, and most demonstrably active supporters of nonhuman rights in Ankh-Morpork, and it may be observed that Nick is nonhuman, a prototype Generation 2 synth. But with an eye towards saying that which has not been said, Commander Vimes is the sort of person who would give a soft drink to a recovering drunkard in need."

Vimes paused in pushing his salad around the plate with the vague intent that if he moved it around enough that maybe it would go away, and he wondered - how did DiMA know that about him?

"Nick is also giving. He would give of his time, of his experience, to assist a grieving parent in tracking down a kidnapped child, though enemies might bar their way, across blasted desert and into the underground."

"It might not be known, the time the two of them spent together in the Commonwealth tracking down evidence to close a case that was two centuries cold, the murder of an innocent woman. They share a love for Justice in all things and for all people, and they will have Justice by the light of day or they will have nothing at all."

"There are no books written of how they risked life and limb together to track down a different young woman, vanished under mysterious circumstances, but they left no stone unturned in determining _exactly_ what happened."

How could DiMA say that with a straight face?

"Dogged tenacity and a tendency to work to exhaustion characterizes both of them. They can't let go. But they can hold each other."

DiMA paused a moment.

"Thank you."

He returned to his place at the table. Vimes reflected that, DiMA knowing things that he shouldn't have aside, the speech hadn’t been nearly as bonkers as he had feared. The groom could have given a speech, but there were two grooms, but Vimes wanted to avoid giving any more speeches than was precisely necessary, and Valentine, Vimes knew, was already extremely uncomfortable with the amount of attention they were getting.

It was a shame that they couldn’t have simply eloped.

Abandoning his salad before the fish course could arrive, because he was bored with lettuce and feeling like a rabbit, Vimes wandered off from the dinner table to examine some of the wedding gifts. He didn’t need any of this, he was sure. An Ephebian ambassador who looked entirely too cozy with Deacon insisted that the Commander look at the urns, which had been turned about, and Vimes started to say, “I suppose we could use more planters for the garden, the dragons are always getting out of their pens and smashing up the pottery…”

“Uh, Sam, sweetheart, maybe look at those later,” Valentine tried to warn, but it was too late.

Vimes stared. It was on an urn, so it was Art, right? It had Culture, if it was on an urn. When he found his voice, he eventually said, “I did not know you could do that with an eagle. I wish I still did not know that you can do that with an eagle.”

Lady Margolotta had sent along a very nervous young-looking vampire as an ambassador, not that appearance meant anything with vampires. She had brought a gift, which was now in a box. Vimes looked in the box. That was a mistake.

She said timorously, “Her Ladyship said that I was to say that since, ah, it seems clear that His Grace enjoys a clockwork d-” 

“Synthetic detective,” Valentine corrected.

“What in the devil did you do to offend Lady Margolotta, that she assigned you here?” Vimes eventually asked, plaintively.

“For my sin of being too clever by half, your Grace,” said the vampire, anxiously.

“Don’t call me ‘your Grace’,” Vimes snapped. Looking for an escape, he picked up DiMA’s box for him. It contained a new tea kettle, a dartboard, a sealed large brown envelope marked ‘open later’, and an insulated flask that turned out to contain a lovely sweet coffee with cream, still piping hot.

Valentine opened his box from DiMA and found what looked like his own optics staring back at him.

Appearing behind them, DiMA said helpfully, “You had expressed a desire for thermal detection systems. I tested them in myself first. You retain full colour vision, plus infrared. The install only takes a few minutes. I have the tools here, if -”

“One, DiMA, we are not opening up my face at my wedding. Two, this is very thoughtful of you, but next time, ask me before designing any body modifications, m’kay?” Valentine snapped, closing the box back up.

It was at that point that a hauntingly familiar voice cut in with, “That pest still givin’ you trouble Cap’n?”

Vimes turned around slowly. It was Longfellow. The man had gone on an alcoholic bender and vanished. He made Sam think of his father, only Longfellow was here now and not buried at Small Gods. He looked from Longfellow to DiMA. There was a very strangely _clean_ scent in the air that wasn’t right at all for Ankh-Morpork. He said weakly, “Longfellow, DiMA’s my brother-in-law now.”

“Aye, in-laws. The worst sort of pest,” said Longfellow, nodding gravely. “Still, took you long enough, di’n’t it?”

Vimes had never needed to worry about in-laws to any large extent with Sybil. She was the last scion of the Ramkin family. She had one doddering elderly uncle, now passed, and a couple of nephews a few times removed. They didn’t have family reunions. Vimes hoped that Valentine appreciated what it meant that Vimes was willing to put up with the general concept of DiMA being invited to Hogswatch, possibly even birthday parties.

“We had some communication issues,” said Valentine. That was a kind way of putting it. He was always very kind.

“What are you doing here?” Vimes asked, catching up on the realization that Longfellow was indeed present.

“Waiting for the fish course to come out?” Longfellow suggested.

“Yes, but, how did you get here? And where did you go?” Vimes inquired.

“Tagged along with some of your lady wife’s friends who were comin’.” He pointed vaguely over at a lady and two gentlemen, to whom Vimes had been introduced by Sybil, so he knew them as Lady Bertha Pettitt and her two dear husbands, Sir Alon and Sir Alan. Sybil hadn’t let Vimes ask which one of them was the changeling and if he still had hard wood or if he was made of something softer, like _Pinus_. “Been ranging out on Fourecks. Not much meat on spiders, and the beer’s tinned, but nowhere’s perfect, is it?”

Then, Deacon pushed a newspaper-wrapped package into Vimes’s hands. Vimes gave him a sullen glare and ripped open the political cartoon and found himself looking at a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs. He exclaimed, irate, “Deacon! You’ve got some nerve.”

“Why are the handcuffs pink?” asked young Sam, who had sensed that the adults were looking at things they didn’t want children to see and had thusly come straight away to see.

“Because I have horrible taste in friends,” Vimes said flatly, wrapping the pink handcuffs back up in the shreds of the political cartoon.

“Correction, you have the best taste in friends,” said Deacon, wandering off with one of the Ephebian ambassadors.

“Have a Hershebar,” said Vimes, grabbing one off the gift table and handing it to young Sam, then walking him back to the dinner table.

The fish course - oysters - blurred into a main course, and then _another_ salad, this time with kale which was just cabbage that was no better than it ought to be, and then _nuts_ , and then a dessert course of mainly chilled fruits that he couldn’t name, and oh, bananas, of course there were bananas, and coffee and tea. Vimes gripped his coffee flask with white knuckles. He wanted to go home and have a lie down until his headache went away, and then he wanted Valentine to join his lie down, but it was time to cut the cake.

The Tsortean ambassadors jumped out of their wooden horse.

They had two groom’s cakes, one chocolate, one fruit. Vimes hadn’t asked which one of them was the fruitcake. Gloomily, he thought it was probably him. Both of the cakes were decorated with fondant Watch badges and truncheons and handcuffs and crossbows. The white icing of a bride’s cake was too light for men, or so they said. It was the fruitcake that mainly was cut into little pieces to be boxed up and not eaten but kept under a pillow for luck by the guests, but the chocolate cake was quite demolished.60

After all those meal courses, which felt like a full degree, it was time to dance.

Vimes hated dancing, not least of all because it made him feel ridiculous, but he knew that Valentine wanted to dance with him, very much so, and had been hitherto unable to do so because Valentine existed at the intersection of several different prejudices, and there was no dancing establishment that would let Valentine in _and_ let him dance with a man. It was like how a three-cart pileup was worse than a two-cart pileup, and a four cart pileup was even worse, and Vimes wouldn’t even get started on the sort of accidents they had around Five Ways.

So Vimes danced with Valentine, and he accidentally stepped on his feet, feeling the metal through the shoes. After an awkward minute, Valentine hissed in his ear, “Let me lead.”

Vimes protested, “You were the one who wanted to dance!”

“...what kind of response is that?” asked Valentine, bewildered. “Yes, I want to dance. Now let me lead, doll, and maybe we’ll both stop looking ridiculous and maybe, just maybe, you won’t break your ankle again, stepping on my feet.”

Vimes grudgingly let Valentine lead, and while he was grumpy about it, it did reduce the amount of unexpected metal objects under his feet.

Then Sybil wanted to dance with him. Then a boggling array of dignitaries wanted to dance with him. He lost Valentine in the crowd. Towards the end, when Vimes finally had the sense that he might soon be able to escape, he refound Valentine, who had been cornered by both a Tsortean ambassador and an Ephebian ambassador. Vimes reclaimed his Valentine, and he was about to steel himself for the last dance of the day when some prat in purple cut in, and Sybil claimed Valentine.

Vimes’s eyes itched. Who was this idiot who’d cut in on him?

Foxy face, too pretty, weak chin, too-large eyes… it was a jumble of features, and Vimes couldn’t put it together, where he’d seen the man before. He was missing something. They bumped closer to young Sam, who had found as a dance partner a young girl in a black star-spangled robe, probably some dignitary’s child, and Vimes put it together.

The ears. He couldn’t seem to look at the ears. The pointed ears.

The elf grabbed for young Sam. Vimes tackled the elf. A portal opened, and they rolled through. As the portal closed, Vimes saw Sybil and Valentine giving pursuit.

60 [Twice the grooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom%27s_cake), [twice the groom cakes,](https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=1S1EAAAAYAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1) but no bride cake to be found.

* * *

Heliotrope was bored. He only ever felt brief thrills that were always laden with the knowledge that the thrill would be gone all too soon, evanescent, the sheen of oil on rainwater, and leave him feeling emptier than before. It didn’t stop him from killing people, of course. But the Watch was getting closer to catching him. He’d resigned himself to the fact that he needed to go back to Fairyland. Unseen University had enough ambient magic and enough dangerous devices just lying around to punch the required hole in reality. He just had to deal with the fact that any half-decent wizard could see him.

The ducal wedding had been the perfect opportunity, with all the wizards busy and preoccupied and drowsy from overeating. Heliotrope had ghosted right in. He could have left it there. He could have made his portal in an out of the way spot. But no, he couldn’t.

The duke’s son wasn’t a prince, but he was the closest thing this miserable city of iron and steam and cabbage had. Stories ran on certain rails. Heliotrope had to make a grab.

So he ended up with the Duke rather than the son.

Heliotrope would make due. Oh yes, the devil would give him his due.

* * *

DiMA mostly stayed out of the dancing. He was having an intensely interesting discussion with Dorfl about the nature of consciousness. Something made his optics itch. DiMA rubbed at his face, wondering if he had a short from taking his optics out, testing the new set for Valentine, and then putting his old optics back. 

Then there was a massive octarine twisting in the air, hideous and resplendent, nearly blinding, as reality ripped open, right in the middle of the dance floor. There was a scuffle, and Vimes and someone in purple - the man who was making his optics itch! - tumbled through. As it closed, both Lady Sybil and Valentine turned and threw themselves into the crackling existential wound.

Then the portal closed.

The very first thing that DiMA wanted to do was go check the readings on Unseen University’s recording equipment. Then his second thoughts caught up with him: his brother had just left this reality for another one, probably one that would be inimical to his life. They needed to retrieve him as swiftly as possible. His third thoughts pointed out: as of 11:00 AM, they’d unfolded the Great Hall. They had 14.14 hours from there, which meant that, if they didn’t retrieve Valentine by 1:08.4 AM, the location in which the portal had appeared would no longer exist, which could complicate his retrieval significantly. His first thoughts argued that the readings on the recording equipment would likely be quite useful with regards to the goals of his second thoughts.

Archchancellor Ridcully was shouting. This was so typical that it barely registered on DiMA’s fourth thoughts. “Stibbons! How did someone walk in here and open an Arcane Gate?”

Somewhere in the crowd, Ponder’s voice answered faintly, “That’s, er, an interesting question, sir, and I’d like to check the readings on some of the equipment -”

“After which, you will put every effort into retrieving his and her Graces, I am sure?” said the Patrician.

DiMA noticed the omission. He was about to pull a trick of his to leave and go check on the readings himself, when a cold hand clasped his shoulder, and a bored, patient voice inquired, “Mr. DiMA, I presume? Are you aware that you are the legal next of kin to young Masters Shaun and Sam Vimes?”

DiMA blinked. He hadn’t dug that far with his thoughts. He said weakly, “I am aware now.”

Shaun was… interesting to DiMA, on so many levels. He was a child Generation 3 synth. Generation 3 synths couldn’t grow. They couldn’t even gain or lose weight. Yet Shaun, over the span of half a year, was clearly now both taller and heavier than DiMA remembered him being, as if he were a human child. Shaun was also the son of a Duke, in every sense that was meaningful, and he appeared to be the older of the Duke’s sons, and DiMA did wonder what that meant with the line of succession.

Young Sam was a pleasant enough human child: intelligent, open-minded, and inquisitive.

He’d interacted a little with both of them at the wedding rehearsals. Shaun called him ‘uncle’ at times, when he thought his father wouldn’t hear. Young Sam wanted to see DiMA’s tricks. He could tell which ones were magic and which ones were not.

In a narrative sense, DiMA could grant that he was kin to Shaun, but no, he had not considered that, in a legal sense, he was kin to both. It necessitated a certain recalibration of his priorities. 

He looked back at the clammy hand grasping his shoulder and saw a scrawny, pearly-eyed vampire, who was, in his other hand, holding a small plate of fruitcake, without any evident enjoyment. The vampire didn’t look like he’d enjoyed _anything_ for years, for that matter. He introduced, “I am, to be brief, Mr. Schwarzlache von Morecombe, the Ra… the _Vimes_ family lawyer. Mr. Vimes should have arranged an appointment for you sooner in acknowledgement of the potential of certain eventualities. You will have specific duties, which will take a not inconsiderable amount of time to detail.”

Oh. DiMA was being tasked with an escort quest, a small, absurd part of himself thought. As Morecombe droned on at DiMA about his responsibilities, DiMA searched through the crowd and found Shaun and young Sam clinging to each other in the delicate way of boys who did not wish to admit to the world that they were clinging to each other out of utter terror and misery.

“Father’s coming back soon with Mother, isn’t he?” said young Sam, with the utter faith of a child.

The thought patterns of human children were significantly different than human adults. DiMA didn’t have much interaction with human children. Some student wizards could be as young as age four, and they certainly counted as children, but DiMA wouldn’t use _their_ thought patterns as a basis for comparison. Most human children didn’t need to devote a significant amount of their cognitive processes to the fact that there were unfathomable beings just a dimension away who wanted to use them and their dreams as yawning portals into this reality.

Maybe young Sam might. That was a thought for another time.

DiMA thought about what the Patrician had said, and he thought about what the Faculty were capable of, when buttock was suitably prodded, and he delivered a statement that he ventured to make both reasonably true and reassuring, “The Archchancellor will marshall his forces to make every attempt to retrieve them.”

Young Sam looked satisfied with that response; Shaun did not. There was a bleakness about Shaun. DiMA could tell the boy had been hurt, even if he was not aware of the precise specifics. Morecombe was still wittering on about DiMA’s avuncular obligations, and DiMA rewound through his short term memory of what Morecombe had just said, trying to discern if he had a legal duty to hunt down anyone who hurt his nephews and -

Well, it would upset Valentine if DiMA’s first option involved shovels in basements, and it would probably make Commander Vimes stern and angry, too.

Ponder found DiMA in the crowd and said brusquely, “Come along. I need someone who isn’t passed out in a food coma as a spare set of hands.”

DiMA inclined his head slightly, letting Ponder see that DiMA was looking at young Sam and Shaun, and he said softly, “I will have to bring my nephews with me, sir.”

Wizards didn’t have children, but wizard’s nephews were practically a standard part of the kit. Hat, staff, nephews...

Surely Ponder would understand.

* * *

Lady Sybil wasn’t going to let some waifish prat in Tyrian purple make a grab at her son and then drag her husband off through some ridiculous breach in reality, and she was satisfied to see that Valentine was of the same sentiment. He helped her to her feet in proper gentlemanly fashion. She drew the broadsword that she’d kept in the back sheath of her flowing blue gown - it was appropriate for a Best Man to wear a more muted version of the groom’s outfit, and if Sam was in his ceremonial armour with a sword at his hip, then his Best Lady was absolutely entitled to carry one of her ancestral swords. Sybil knew at least a little of what her husband tended to get up to. Carrying a sword to the wedding had been a prudent decision, even if Sybil didn’t like weapons.

Valentine was scanning the horizon. There was something wrong with it and wrong with this world in general. It was bister, like the soot of beechwood, like Quirmian stamps. Colours weren’t themselves. It was as if the Creator had a sale on ecru and ochre and was determined to use it all up. The light fell strangely, not like liquid honey, but in flares that streaked and blinded.

Valentine frowned and said, “I think we’re in a da - ah, excuse, me, I think we’re in an icono-game again. The renders look like sh - pardon - like garbage, your ladyship.”

Irritated, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and was about to light one when he caught himself, and then he guiltily stuffed the pack of cigarettes and lighter back into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Sybil took one hand off the hilt of her broadsword and covered her mouth with her fingers, trying to hide a giggle. Valentine could so remind her of their Sam - and they needed to find Sam without delay. She said hesitantly, “I don’t know that we’re in an icono-game, and Nick, please, you needn’t use my titles. Not now.”

She hardly thought her titles would be necessary or useful here, and she was trying to stop Valentine from using them around the house as it was. He could be so stiff at times. 

“No? Sure doesn’t seem like reality to me,” said Valentine, who picked a direction and started walking.

They were in a grassland of beige wild grain. A chill wind whipped the grass at their ankles like razors. There didn’t seem to be anything in the distance, and the clouds were strange. They didn’t seem to blow with the wind. Sybil shivered; her blue gown wasn’t the warmest outfit. “You hear stories about places like these. Not in the city, of course, and it hardly happens even to people in the country anymore.”

Valentine offered her his jacket. It didn’t fit, but she draped it over her shoulders like a stole. He asked, “Oh, like that friend of yours who got dragged off by the elves?”

Maybe Valentine shouldn’t have said the e-word, but Sybil was straightaway distracted by an inverted mountain suddenly visible on the horizon. Why hadn’t she been able to see it before? It had loomed into view without warning, but now she felt that it had always been there. Given Sybil’s own particular interests, she recognized it immediately. “The Wyrmberg!”

She’d always been here, the dragon lady, with her flock of noble dragons. She’d always worn scale-mail that was oddly drafty. And she’d always, always been able to keep her wig perfectly pinned to her head as she walked upside down across the ceiling of the inside of the Wyrmberg to the cavern where Lady Sparkjoy the Fiddlewhumper, the best in breed three years running in the Draco Nobilis Championships, was waiting for her. She conformed to breed standard exactly, with scales like moonlight, eyes like fire, a great head that could swallow a man whole, and absolutely no pouting of the wouters.

Sparkjoy was just a big softie, really, and Sybil hardly ever needed to have her eat someone alive. It was easier on her digestion if they were cooked first.

After some examination, Sybil trimmed her talons. She was going to need to have more pumice brought in as scratching rocks. 

Then she checked in the cavern below, where the Commander of her Dragon Guard, her dear Samuel Vimes, was sitting at his desk. Curled behind his desk, his tail flicking at Vimes’s feet, was the copper dragon she’d named Suffer-Not-Injustice for him. Suffer-Not was a copper dragon, not much bigger than a horse - Vimes already didn't trust horses, he wasn’t going to go in for a huge galumphing thing of a dragon. Suffer-Not never won any breed standard awards. The scales looked rumpled, somehow, and the eyes looked like lanterns in the dark. Suffer-Not was not the sort of dragon who would fight fair, but he was the sort of dragon with the delicacy of claw to take a messenger pigeon alive on the wing. You know, if the pigeon might be found to be carrying the wrong message, which Vimes might kindly want to correct.

Curled up with Suffer-Not was Marty, a steel dragon a little bigger than Suffer-Not, who’d been injured many, many times in the line of duty, defending the Wyrmberg, and who had been more… repaired, than healed, due to the nature of the injuries he’d accrued. One wing had been replaced entirely with a canvas-and-pulley mechanism. Marty liked to bite off more than he could chew, but he was a darling, like his rider, Nick Valentine, who was her husband’s second mate.

Suffer-Not had taken Marty, and when the dragons decided, there was really nothing for it.

Why, exactly, Lady Sparkjoy had taken Suffer-Not was a bit of a mystery, but Sybil did so love her husband. Perhaps, sometimes, it was the humans deciding that influenced the dragons instead of the other way around...

Vimes looked up at her as she dropped down into his office, and Sybil said, “Dear, we’re going to need more pumice.”

“I’ll put it on the scouting parties’ watch list straightaway,” he said.

Down further below, she found Valentine leaning against one of the small alcoves that dotted the inside of the Wyrmberg, watching as Shaun and young Sam flew on their dragons in the massive central cavern. He smiled at her and kissed her hand, greeting, “Your ladyship.” Then he paused and frowned. “Wait, you told me not to call you that.”

Sybil thought. Something tugged at her. It passed. “...oh, yes, there’s no need for the formality.”

“Young Sam’s getting really good at flying. Takes more after you,” Valentine observed.

“Our Sam’s not _bad_ at flying,” Sybil said, mildly defensive.

“I mean, he uses three belaying ropes, but sure. Not bad,” Valentine snorted.

“But he _is_ very good at knotwork.”

“Yeah. He is.”

It was lovely, her little family and their respective specimens of _Draco nobilis_ and their unchallenged dominion over the airspace of the Wyrmberg. She’d brokered a mutual defense treaty with Havelock Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork, who was also a darling man. The Wyrmberg was receiving its first few shipments of Retribushium, made possible by their negotiations with the dwarves. It was light enough that even laden dragons in flight could wear it easily. Hopefully they’d avoid more bad injuries like Marty’s.

Valentine looked puzzled, as if examining his scale mail for the first time. “This shows a lot of, uh, plastic, doesn’t it?”

“It’s what we always wear,” said Sybil, confused.

“Yeah, but… I’m pretty sure I like to cover up more than this?” said Valentine. “I ain’t exactly a pretty sight.” He tried to wrap his brown oilskin cape around himself. Had he always had a cape? It seemed impractical; another dragon could snatch a cape easily, although it would certainly keep off the rain during stormy flights.

“You needn’t be so self-conscious,” Sybil chided.

“If you say so,” he said, distantly.

“I do,” Sybil said, firmly.

“How do they fly, anyway?” asked Valentine. “The dragons. They’re so big. The lift-to-weight ratios don’t make sense.”

Sybil frowned. She knew that Valentine should know this. “Residual high magic fields, leftover from the Mage Wars.”

“Oh. Yeah. That,” said Valentine, shaking himself.

“Perhaps that apprentice wizard brother of yours could look into seeing if the magic field could be expanded. Then we could travel farther afield from the Wyrmberg on dragon wing,” said Sybil.

“DiMA’s in Ankh-Morpork, studying at Unseen University,” said Valentine. Then he paused and frowned. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course. Havelock paid for his tuition, remember?” said Sybil.

“He did what!?” Valentine snapped, startled.

“Yes, we had tea, oh, two months ago, and he mentioned -” Sybil paused. Ankh-Morpork was 2,000 miles away. There was absolutely no way that she’d had tea with Havelock two months ago. Dragons couldn’t fly that far from the Wyrmberg, and the rail didn’t travel as far as Hergen.

But she remembered having tea with Havelock. She remembered having tea with Havelock regularly. He’d asked her if she knew how long synths lived…

Maybe she’d teleported? But her Sam hated teleporting.

Young Sam really was a natural at flying, though, wasn’t he? Sybil called Lady Sparkjoy down. The great dragon uncurled and slipped slowly through the air. Lady Sparkjoy was a good 45 meters long, the largest of all the dragons of the Wyrmberg. Alas, there would not be another her like for many generations; Lady Sparkjoy’s clutches with Suffer-Not would never replicate her resplendent size. Still, outcrosses were good for the vigour of a line, done judiciously.

Sybil leapt onto Lady Sparkjoy’s back, and Lady Sparkjoy twisted sinuously through the air and pulled up alongside the dragons of her two sons. Shaun’s, a white dragon, was rather timid. Young Sam had a golden dragon, very big for one of Lady Sparkjoy’s with Suffer-Not. The conformation was quite nearly breed standard. 

She called out over the lazy susurration of slow wingbeats, “Havelock’s having rail laid down towards Hergen.”

“Whatever,” said young Sam, uninterested.

Sybil frowned. Young Sam liked trains. She knew he did. It was his latest phase.

“Now Shaun, your father’s going to have a scouting party out looking for more pumice, that might be a good time for you to get more practice flying outside the Wyrmberg,” Sybil suggested.

“I’m busy,” Shaun grumped, which was extremely unlike him. He was usually almost painfully eager to please. “Go get a servant to do it.”

Then young Sam dove his dragon like a peregrine falcon in a stoop, the wings flaring out at the last moment as the dragon’s legs punched down, and the dragon winged up with something small and struggling, which the dragon casually tossed into the air and swallowed in two bites.

“Moooom, young Sam’s letting his dragon eat the servants again,” Shaun whined.

Her young Sam wouldn’t do that. He would never do that!

Sybil was so startled that she nearly fell off Lady Sparkjoy’s broad back. She landed back on a cavern wall and stalked up the rings that dotted the cavern walls. Valentine followed her. He was nosy like that, but she didn’t mind it from him. Sybil ran along the rings until she reached Sam’s office. Trembling, she wept, “Sam, young Sam let his dragon eat one of the servants!”

There was a strangled look on Vimes, a darkness behind his eyes. Then he turned to stone and said, “Young Sam wouldn’t do that.”

“But he did! Oh Sam, what will we do?” said Sybil, dizzy with panic.

“No, I’m with Sam - young Sam wouldn’t do that,” said Valentine, “and Shaun’s not that rude.”

“Sybil, did I ever tell you about what happens when you eliminate the possibilities?” asked Vimes, who didn’t seem to be entirely there.

Sybil frowned. “But dear, you hate it when people talk about that kind of thing.” Then she thought. “Young Sam’s not acting like Young Sam, either. It’s not young Sam.”

Still flying out in the cavern, Lady Sparkjoy started to turn translucent.

“This isn’t real.”

* * *

October 23, 2077 AD, came and went. Missiles never flew. The bombs never fell. There was no Great War.

Detective Nick Valentine was transferred back to Chicago, leaving behind a copy of his brain stored in the databanks of C.I.T.

It never got any easier.

They gave him a partner, one Detective Samuel Vimes, Sam to his friends. Sam didn’t have many friends.

Vimes was an English expatriate. Back in 2052, he’d been running away from the European-Middle Eastern Resource Wars. Vimes made it in just before the US closed its borders in response to the New Plague. He’d lived in New York for most of his life since hitting the States, but now here he was, in Valentine’s city, Chicago.

The man had damage, but didn’t they all? And damn if he wasn’t the best partner Valentine had ever had. If it wasn’t for Vimes, Valentine would have gone back to Boston and bought himself a ticket to the electric chair putting a hole in the head of one Edward L. Winter.

They moved in together after a few months. Both their apartments were tiny and barren and depressing, with suspicious chemical stains on the carpet. They didn’t need to be paying for two of them. Not in this economy.

Valentine woke up early, unrefreshed. Vimes was still snoring. Neither of them ever slept well, but Valentine was frankly an insomniac and had the C.I.T. head-shrinker’s note to prove it. Had been ever since Jenny died. He had a cigarette in bed before getting up to put a pot of coffee on. Valentine dressed, and Vimes rolled himself out of bed with a groan, drawn to the smell of coffee. He dressed.

They drank their coffee, Valentine’s black, Vimes’s sepia from sugar and cream. They shared a kiss. Vimes scavenged a cold, stale doughnut-hole out of a half empty box of Slocum Joe's Buzzbites and shoveled a second one in Valentine’s mouth. Valentine never felt like eating, but Vimes saw to it that he did.

Then they were on the job, and it was a doozy. There had been a string of damned gruesome murders. The latest one had been of a homeless man sheltering under an overpass. The chalk outline looked like a protective invocation, someone’s desperate desire to contain whatever had happened here.

“His head’s gone,” observed Vimes, deadpan.

The head looked as if it had been torn off. Valentine wasn’t sure where it was, but he had a suspicion, given how there was a fine spray of pulped flesh on concrete and also the underside of the overpass, a good 20 feet above. It was as if someone ripped his head off like a grape from the vine and then squeezed until it popped.

Valentine let his eyes look down the body. “Thighs gnawed…”

“Found by someone driving by. Didn’t see anyone there,” said the officer on scene.

They never had any witnesses. No nail clippings. No hair strands. No stray scraps of textile. No fingerprints but the fingerprints of the victims - usually people who were isolated and lived on the edge. Some of them had put up a fight, but scrapings from under their nails never came back with any usable DNA. They victims always looked half-eaten, for lack of a better term, but there was no wild animal in Chicago that could do such a thing.

Valentine and Vimes even talked to a bear expert, a zoologist down at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Nice lady. The claw and teeth marks were the wrong shape for a bear - or for any animal. She told them that someone was playing them for a set of fools with movie props sharpened to a cutting edge.

“So, what… the perp takes some street-grade Psycho and goes to town playing t-rex like this is The Lost Continent?61” Valentine speculated, looking down at the body in the chalk outline.

“It’s her again,” said Vimes, his head whipping around as he launched into a run.

There was a broad. There was always a broad. She’d been showing up around these murders, but she’d get skittish and run if they noticed her. She was a little taller than Valentine, built like a Valkyrie, dressed like a dame Indiana Jones with a beige many-pocketed shirt and a brown pencil skirt. They’d chased her before.

This time, Vimes caught her, pinning one of her hands above her head to the brick wall of a back alley.

“Officers, am I under arrest?” she asked as Valentine caught up. There was a dazzling smile on her face like sunlight.

Police could always find a reason to make an arrest. Vimes never did without good reason. He was an immigrant with an accent, and when he went home at night, he went home with a man. He had his reasons for not abusing his powers. Valentine had his reasons why he loved Vimes. Vimes said stiffly, “Ma’am, we’d like to ask you a few questions with regards to one of our investigations.”

Her name was Miss Sybil Ramkin - Valentine recognized the last name. The Ramkins were one of the richest families in Chicago, old money. They’d mostly died out. Valentine had heard the heiress was a recluse who scorned society functions. It seemed that was so.

Miss Ramkin was also a US Army scientist, as it turned out, proven when she flashed her ID badge. That meant she didn’t have to tell them jack. She could have the both of them in a military brig with the snap of her fingers. 

But instead, she offered, “Maybe we could work together, officers. I’m looking for the... killer, just like you are.”

“And what would you know about it, ma’am?” Valentine asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Miss Ramkin said. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you. My supervisor will bite my head off over this.” Her grin turned ironic.

“...literally?” Vimes asked, head tilted to one side.

“I couldn’t say,” she said again.

“C’mon, what’re we talkin’ here? Some soldier goes AWOL with a big stash of Psycho?” cajoled Valentine.

“Here’s my card. Give me a call at the next victim,” Miss Ramkin said, giving Vimes her card and folding his hand over hers.

“There’s going to be a next victim?” Vimes said weakly.

“I’m afraid so,” said Miss Ramkin, and the Valkyrie looked fragile. “Now boys, I must be off. Do give me a ring.”

Vimes let her go and, after she’d gone, he kicked a rock savagely down the sidewalk. “Army! What I wouldn’t do to arrest the lot of them…”

“For what?” Valentine asked, morbidly curious.

Vimes ticked off on his fingers. “Conspiracy to cause an affray, going equipped to commit a crime, obstruction, threatening behavior, loitering with intent, loitering within a tent, hah, traveling for the purposes of committing a crime, malicious lingering, carrying concealed weapons…”

Valentine laughed. “God, you’re a trip, sometimes, Sam.”

He had the vague feeling that, perhaps in another life, Vimes _had_ arrested an army. It was a strange thought. Valentine let it pass.

So was life: a series of investigating the end of others.

Days off happened. Sometimes they’d hit up a jazz joint together, one of the ones that _understood_ , where he could hold Vimes in his arms on the dancefloor, and Valentine would have a bourbon and Vimes would have a lemonade. It was funny, the first time Vimes had a lemonade with Valentine, he said, “You know, back in England, a lemonade wasn’t sweetened lemon juice. It was more like Nuka-Clear.”

“That’s depressing,” Valentine said.

“Mm,” Vimes said, sipping his lemonade and shrugging.

Sometimes, Valentine thought about asking Vimes if he’d go down to the courthouse with him. They couldn’t have a church wedding, but they could make it nice and legal. The rest of the precinct already derided them as pansies behind their backs. It wasn’t like they had anything to lose.

Then Valentine thought about Jenny, beautiful, innocent Jenny, her blood red on the concrete, and the words died on his tongue before he could say them, every time he tried.

The next time they found a similar victim, which was not a week later, they did give Miss Ramkin a ring, and she showed up with military night vision goggles and went off running, though damned if Valentine could see what she was running after.

At the edge of the Navy Pier, they saw a great big lot of nothing hit Lake Michigan with a cannonball that would have done a sumo wrestler proud.

“We’re chasing the invisible man,” said Valentine, looking from the receding ripples in the water back to Miss Ramkin and her night vision goggles.

Valentine wished he had night vision goggles. His brother had gotten him thermal detectors, though; he just needed to have them installed. Valentine blinked, examining that stray thought. He didn’t have a brother, and there was no way he was having thermal detectors installed. That sounded like something out of _Astoundingly Awesome Tales_.

He needed sleep.

“There’s people dead on the ground, and we’re hunting a bloody ghost! How do you expect us to do our job?” Vimes snapped.

Miss Ramkin looked sad. She might have even been sincere. “I would help more, if I could. My hands are tied.”

Vimes put his hand on Valentine’s arm, and he said, “When we’re off the clock, we’re making a little… shopping trip.”

“For night vision goggles?” asked Miss Ramkin.

Vimes kept a perfectly straight face and said nothing. Civvies, even civvie cops, didn’t get military tech like that.

“I could help you with that. You know. As a friend,” she offered.

After hours, they hit up a sleazy little store that clearly didn’t want cops and didn’t want Army in it and walked off with two sets of night vision goggles, which had surely fallen off the back of a truck, ahem, courtesy of Miss Ramkin’s dime. Then Miss Ramkin asked if she could buy the boys a drink.

Vimes looked awkward; the man was a teetotaller, and he got flustered around dames and around men who might like him. Valentine answered for them both, “Sure thing, sweetheart, but Sam here will have a lemonade.”

She might let something slip.

What slipped was that Miss Ramkin loved her work - whatever it was; she couldn’t talk about it - but she was lonely. Sure, she had friends, other scientists who did things she couldn’t say, either. But she also couldn’t say the last time she’d just gone out.

Vimes was tongue-tied the whole time.

One time turned into another and the sensible attire of an Army scientist turned to a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the smoky neon light of an erratically flashing pink ‘E’.

In the pit of Valentine’s stomach, he knew that maybe they’d still be partners on the force, but he was going to lose Vimes. It always went that way - a dangerous dame in a trouble she couldn’t name, a noir detective - it might end in tears, like his sweet Jenny, her hair making a saint’s halo around her head, it just might end in wedding bells, but it never ended with the detective coming home to his partner.

In the night, when Valentine couldn’t sleep but Vimes could, he held his head, and he wept for the mauled victims of a phantom at least as sick as the Fens Phantom, for his Jenny, and for himself. Maybe, after Vimes left, he’d go looking for Eddie Winter. His gaze drifted to his gun holster.

Vimes wasn’t as asleep as Valentine had thought. He wrapped an arm around Nick’s waist and reached up to flick away one of Valentine’s tears with the other. “Another flashback about Jenny?”

“Not as such,” Valentine said hoarsely, lying back down with Vimes and curling into his embrace. “Miss Ramkin’s taken a shine to you.”

“Oh, Nick,” Vimes dismissed. “She’s just keeping us busy. We’ll never crack this case. The Army won’t have it.”

“That may be, but it seems like she’d like to have you,” Valentine mumbled.

Vimes laughed nervously. “Why would you say that?”

“C’mon, doll, it’s a story as old as Marlowe - Philip Marlowe. A dame, a detective -” Valentine started.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, dear, but you’re also a detective,” Vimes said dryly. “Possibly not a very good one…”

“ _Hey_ ,” Valentine growled.

“Don’t worry yourself. I’m not leaving you,” Vimes said firmly.

Another victim, this one fresher. Dead in an alley, fairly torn apart. Just as Miss Ramkin arrived, Valentine thought to look up with his night vision goggles, and he saw, hanging off the fire escape, a massive form that, even with the blurry shapelessness of night vision goggles, was distinctly inhuman. Valentine drew his sidearm, but Miss Ramkin grabbed his arm and protested, “No, you can’t! He’s just scared and lost. That’s why he’s acting out!”

“Well, _I_ don’t like the idea of citizens being turned into mere mincemeat!” said Vimes, who drew his own sidearm and fired before Miss Ramkin could grab his arm away.

The flash of the muzzle blinded them all. The bullet must have hit something, because the beast howled. Valentine’s vision recovered as a long, hooked claw slashed down the side of his face, just before the ear and down his neck. His goggles fell, the strap ripped, and blood gushed across his eye.

Through red-tinged vision, he saw a hulking, hunchbacked, bipedal reptilian with long humanoid arms. Valentine clocked it at nine and a half feet tall, with a thick and resilient hide, powerful muscles and twelve-inch-long, razor-sharp claws still dripping with his blood. Reeling with pain, he cried out, “Deathclaw! Damn!”

Vimes emptied his clip into the monster, and when it knocked the gun from his hand, he clambered on top of a dumpster, pulled out his truncheon, and dropped down on top with a sickening snap. The monster dropped, and Vimes rolled off.

Miss Ramkin rushed to the creature’s side, sighing, “Oh, Count Coulrice. You shouldn’t have slashed up the nice detective’s face. And now you’re dead. I’ll need to have a Vertibird called in to carry you home.”

“You named a deathclaw ‘Count Coulrice’?” Valentine said, his world pain and crimson and confusion.

Miss Ramkin’s face became a mask, and she said quietly, “I didn’t tell you this is a deathclaw. So I must ask, Detective Valentine, how do you know?”

How _did_ he know that the chameleon-skinned mutant beast was called a deathclaw? And… hadn’t he seen Vimes drop down on and kill a deathclaw before? What was going on with his memory? Valentine said bleakly, “I don’t know.”

“There will be others who won’t ask as nicely as I do,” said Miss Ramkin.

Valentine heard the sound of rotors. She cracked him over the head with the butt of her pistol, and the world ended for a while.

He awoke with his face and neck itching and his wrists sore and his head hammering like the worst hangover of his life in a very large, very soft queen bed. Valentine swiftly realized that his wrists were sore because he was handcuffed to the spindles of the lovely carved mahogany wood headboard. His wound had been sutured and an ointment applied over it. He was dressed in a set of pyjamas.

Beside him, Vimes was snoring loud enough to saw wood, also handcuffed. He was also in pyjamas, which meant that Vimes hadn’t put himself to sleep. Vimes slept naked.

The room was decorated with dinosaurs and dragons and reptiles but in a certain… feminine way. It was the room of a woman who looked at scaley things and felt the way that other women felt about cats.

Whatever Valentine had been expecting, this was not it. He poked at Vimes with his foot, and when all he got was a ’gneh’, he upgraded the poke to a kick. Vimes awoke slowly, like molasses, and he groaned, “What did we do last night?”

The noise drew the sound of heavy, firm footsteps, and Miss Ramkin entered the bedroom with a tray laden with two plates of bacon, fried potatoes, and eggs. She sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “You’re awake before I thought you would be.”

“You have some explaining to do, doll,” Valentine snapped.

“No, Mr. Valentine. I’m afraid that you do. I apologize for knocking the both of you out, but I needed to be able to tell my supervisor that you hadn’t seen anything. But you did, and I’m going to need you to swear to me that you won’t talk about what you’ve seen, and I need to know how you know about deathclaws. No funny business,” said Miss Ramkin.

“I don’t suppose we have any choice,” Vimes said bitterly, although his eyes were glued on the bacon on the plate, “It’s agree, or bloody jack-booted thugs will disappear us.”

Valentine closed his eyes and concentrated. “Y’know hitting a guy over the head ain’t good for his memory, right? I… I was in a wasteland. And I heard one in the distance, and Jim told me those bellows mean deathclaws, and if you’re close enough to hear, you need to already have been running.”

Miss Ramkin blinked. “Who is Jim?”

Valentine blinked. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to play wise with you, I swear. I just don’t know. I get flashes. Of memory. Of another life.”

Miss Ramkin sighed. “I shouldn’t, but I believe you. Will you both swear to me that you won’t speak of this?”

“What about justice for the dead?” asked Vimes sharply.

Miss Ramkin looked sad. “There’s nothing to be done.”

“Gods, I bet your supervisor considers this a splendid field test, wouldn’t they? Probably going to drop the bloody things in China,” Vimes said cynically.

_Gods_. But Vimes was a lapsed-bordering-on agnostic Protestant, a descendent of the infamous Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Gods?

“I don’t see that talking gets us anywhere but dead, Sam,” Valentine said.

“Yes, I know. I don’t have to like it,” snorted Vimes. “Fine. I swear I’ll keep the Army’s dirty secret about chameleon monsters.”

“Yeah. I’ll keep my mouth shut,” said Valentine, though the words tasted bitter.

Dying wouldn’t help the dead any.

Miss Ramkin uncuffed Vimes, who reached for the bacon. He’d always been a fiend for bacon. Sam sometimes said that deathclaw tasted a bit like bacon -

“This isn’t right,” said Valentine.

“You have to understand, this is about national security,” Miss Ramkin said, trying to feed him a piece of potato on a fork.

Valentine batted it away irritably. “No, I mean - I remember Sam saying deathclaw tastes like bacon. And he dropped down on Count Coulrice like he’d killed a deathclaw before. Wouldn’t - wouldn’t the Army be interested in a man who can kill that kinda thing with a truncheon?” His mouth twisted with displeasure, as he thought about the rumoured super-soldier projects.

Miss Ramkin looked at Vimes with interest.

“I was upset. It had hurt you,” Vimes said carefully, peeling his bacon apart and eating it in strips.

“You just swore by ‘Gods’. I - I remember having a brother. I don’t have a brother. He looks like…” Valentine looked to Miss Ramkin. “Do you have a mirror I could use?”

Miss Ramkin had a rich woman’s dressing room with a large mirror, which Valentine stared into. Brown-gold hazel eyes, medium-brown skin, dark hair, and, of course, the sutured injury running down his face to his neck. It felt all wrong. His skin crawled.

A woman’s pair of nail scissors sat on the bathroom counter, and Valentine picked them up and slit the sutures, re-opening the wound.

Metal and wires stared back at him.

61 [Not to be confused with the Last Continent.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Continent_\(1951_film\))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** The World of Poo mentions that in Ankh-Morpork, they are considering a law requiring that you have to have your waste removed rather than Ankh-Morpork’s *cough* traditional disposal methods. We run with the assumption that that law gets made, but it’s bound to eventually cause issues sooner or later, not least of which because in Ankh-Morpork, waste removal is a _paid service_ being run by a _monopoly_ owned by a single private citizen and not a public utility.
> 
> **S:** Sybil’s dream interpretation of what it’s like to be a Wyrmberg dragon rider isn’t exactly an accurate representation of actual Wyrmberg dragons and dragon riders, although it may take some inspiration from their inspiration...
> 
> **A:** Harry King is a railway Baron. Ha ha.
> 
> **A:** The little girl in the black glittery robe will be explained in a different fic.
> 
> **A:** The Art of Discworld talks about Carrot and Angua maybe getting married.
> 
> **S:** ~~The Groom's Cake footnote originally included a second link, one to a PDF that had recipes, but it tragically vanished from the internet less than a week before this chapter went up. :(~~ After some searching, we found it elsewhere on the internet. It has _recipes_!
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	22. A Useful Student * Going to Hell is Easy * The Long Arm of Community Outreach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [What Kind Of Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCeRNpR09es&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=31) by Florence + The Machine, [Red Right Hand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxePKps87k&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=32) by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, [Metal Heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWSieCl6ROA&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=33) by Garbage, and [For the Heart I Once Had](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZN_4NkbUo&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=34) by Nightwish
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_A Useful Student * Going to Hell is Easy * The Long Arm of Community Outreach_

Elves weren’t creative. Heliotrope would never have come up with an interface helmet that looked like the one DiMA used to access his memories, that looked like the interface helmet that had originally dragged Vimes into the icono-game. He didn’t need to come up with it. It was there in Vimes’s mind, and all the effort it had taken on Heliotrope’s part was to cut off Vimes’s helmet and breastplate with his stone knife, being careful not to touch the nasty steel, and to reach into his mind and pull the interface helmet out.

This helmet was a little different, though. On the inside, the interface had several half-inch spikes, which were now embedded in Vimes’s scalp, blood trickling down through his hair and over his face. Heliotrope hadn’t thought of that, either; the spikes were simply a fear on Vimes’s part, the… penetrative aspect.

The helmet let Vimes’s mind go wandering to be among the dream-illusions woven by the dromes. The dromes put a trap in their dreams, bait, like an anglerfish. Anyone who ate the insubstantial food of the dreams would never _want_ to leave. They’d starve eventually, of course, but the drome would grow fat.

The idiots who would steal his toy away from him had already eaten the food.

More blood dripped from the helmet, and Vimes’s eyes snapped open, full of a fury that would have put a volcano goddess to shame. His mind returned to him, but it didn’t do him any good. Heliotrope had bound him to a chair with scratchy hempen rope, tight enough to whiten his flesh.

Heliotrope tipped Vimes’s chin up with a finger, and he chided, “Back to the dreams for you. Your lemans will miss you.”

“They’re coming for you. You’d better hope I get myself loose before they reach me,” Vimes snarled, flexing against the ropes.

“You’d like your hands around my neck, and yet you think they’ll do something worse with me… and yet you think they’re so much _better_ than you. Only a human could come up with such an amusing self-contradiction,” said Heliotrope, clapping.

He’d found a forsaken, blasted little piece of Fairyland, out of sight of the King. Everything was sepia-tinted. Everyone knew sepia-tint was more realistic. However, even the sepia couldn’t disguise that there was something wrong with the horizon and how the frigid sunlight fell.

But they were indoors, in Vault 111, which had been pulled from Vimes’s memories, and Vimes was tied to the Overseer’s chair, because that wasn’t a rolling chair. It also meant that Heliotrope could see on the Overseer’s monitors who might be coming.

Vimes seethed, “They _are_ better than I am. It doesn’t mean I can’t try to do them proud. In fact, it means that I should make every attempt.”

“Have you decided which one you’ll pick to leave behind?” asked Heliotrope.

“Which one I’ll _what_?” Vimes spat.

“It’s traditional. If they make it to you,” and they wouldn’t, “you might pick one and leave and never look back,” said Heliotrope, which was a lie. None of them would ever leave here, but offering false hope to a human was one of the most delectable pleasures available to an elf. He’d drink in that heady nectar, gorge himself.

“No,” Vimes said mulishly. “I’m not playing your game. You can get tossed.”

“I suppose we both know it’s your Valentine,” said Heliotrope airily. “You don’t really love Valentine, and he knows it.” 

"No, you're wrong! I've never loved anyone like I love Valentine," Vimes said urgently.

"Oh? So it's your wife you don't really love?" Heliotrope inquired sweetly.

"No, I've never loved anyone like I love Sybil."

Heliotrope tried to point out the contradiction, "But you just said-"

"I said I've never loved anyone like I love Valentine, and I haven't. I don't love Sybil like I love Nick, and I don’t love Nick like I love Sybil, and I've never loved anyone like I love them."

"Hmm. Sounds like a cop-out to me," said Heliotrope, to dig the barb in, despite the fact that he knew Vimes wasn’t lying.

The question was, did Vimes know he wasn’t lying?

* * *

Valentine slit his face open along the side, threw up, and found that he didn’t want to be dreaming anymore, even if in dreams, he could be human, real flesh-and-blood, and Vimes could be his partner every day. Sybil put her broadsword through something with dumpy legs and a big, soggy face. She stood there, panting a moment over the dead grotesque, and then she sat down, trembling. Valentine patted her shoulder. 

“That was the monster that was tricking us, wasn’t it?” said Sybil, unsure of herself, as something that wasn’t blood rolled off her sword.

“I think so,” said Valentine hollowly.

Sybil shook herself and drew herself up, and she could have led an army. She could have retaken Fort Independence. “Right. So let’s go find our husband.”

The blasted grassland only grew colder, the biting cold of the Commonwealth in the winter, which could be far more frigid than Ankh-Morpork ever was. Sometimes Valentine saw hares go running by, whipping past his ankles, or cats stalking62, but mostly, it was desolate.

Sometimes there were trees, more dead than alive, and in the trees were birds. Valentine hissed, “Institute crows. They’re synthetic birds, made to spy.”

“Really? I thought they might be the spirits of the restless dead,” Sybil said faintly, “Those rejected by the deities themselves. They’re called sluagh63. They flock like that. They’re troublesome and destructive.”

Whatever they were, the birds were watching them, and Valentine didn’t once see them blink.

They gave a ring of glowing mushrooms a wide berth, pivoting their path far off to the side as soon as they saw it in the distance. Whether it was, as Sybil said, a fairy ring, where they would dance until they died, or whether it was merely a ring of glowing mushrooms that marked an area of high radiation, they wanted no part of it.

Valentine saw the soldier first, and he pulled Sybil aside, behind the trunk of a tree that had given up on life. He laid a finger across her lips and pointed at the soldier in the distance, murmuring, “Soldier off in the distance, there. Maybe a Gunner. I don’t think he’s seen us.”

Sybil risked a peek, and she whispered back, “Oh, Nick. That soldier has a red right hand.” She shivered. “The Ly Erg64 has a red right hand. Fight them, and win or lose, you’ll be dead in a fortnight.”

“I’ve always believed that discretion’s the better part of valour,” said Valentine, who was never one for unnecessary fisticuffs, anyway.

It didn’t matter if they were taking the long way around. They didn’t even know where they were going.

When eight feet of green muscles came crashing through the forest and bearing down on them, they couldn’t avoid it. Valentine shouted, “Super mutant, run!”

He darted off to the side, avoiding a swung tree, and then came around the side, swinging up with his metal hand, clocking what he thought was a super mutant on the side of the head.

But Sybil didn’t run, instead charging with her broadsword, ululating a war cry that resounded through the forest and could have cleaned glass. Broadsword clashed with a wooden board with nails in it. The board broke, but Sybil was knocked down. The brute grabbed for her hair.

Valentine growled, “You lay off the lady, you lout!” trying to get its attention. He scrambled to pick up the half-a-broken-2-by-4. The 2-by-2?

Sybil’s hair came away in its hand, her wig ripped off to reveal her natural close-cropped hair. She pushed herself up with a hand and drove the broadsword through the arch of its foot as it raised its foot to stomp on her. She said, “Super mutant? Are you quite sure? I think it seems quite like what the childrens’ storybooks would call an ogre.”

Valentine cracked the 2-by-2 against the back of its knee, and as it fell, it flung Valentine into the trunk of a tree, and Sybil rolled away. Valentine’s vision exploded in stars, and he doubled over, slumping near the tree. He should have been smart, like Sybil, he thought. He should have gone armed to his wedding. Sybil, with her broadsword, had clearly known what was up.

The monster started to prop itself up, and Valentine grunted, “What difference would it make, super mutant or ogre?”

“I think ogres are supposed to be smarter than Strong is,” Sybil confided, getting to her feet.

“Oh. Great,” said Valentine, darkly, as he gave the side of his head a knock, trying to get his optics to stop shorting.

“I am unstoppable!” the monster boomed, as it grabbed Sybil’s arm and dragged her in for a bite.

The arm was holding the broadsword, though, and Sybil sawed it into the monster’s neck. She couldn’t hack it all the way through the thick, muscular flesh, but the monster released her arm, and Valentine could see deep teeth-gouges. It grabbed her head and squeezed.

Her hands were free.

Sybil slid the blade under its ribcage and up without a word at all.

Both of them fell. Valentine hurried to his feet and rushed to her side. She seemed dazed, and Valentine tugged off his ascot and bound up her arm, doing what he could to staunch the bleeding, her red blood staining the magenta silk. The monster groaned, and Valentine put one foot on its belly and tugged the broadsword out with both hands. There was a gush of dark blood, and the monster was still.

Sybil took her broadsword back wordlessly. She was a better hand with a sword than Valentine, he knew from when they’d sparred, him with his work shortsword that he’d never actually used on the job. She practiced about half an hour every other day. She called it jolly good calisthenics. Sybil sniffled, “I’m sorry, Nick. I shouldn’t have let it bite me. Now I’ve gone and ruined your ascot.”

Valentine gave her a hug and reassured, “Don’t you worry about it. You just saved both our lives. You’re a peach.”

Sybil reclaimed her wig and pinned it back to her head. Not far from where the monster had attacked them, they found grisly meat of a suspicious shape hung from trees and cages and a cooking fire. Unfortunately, this did nothing to clarify to them whether what they had fought had been a super mutant or an ogre.

“Oh,” said Sybil softly, looking troubled, as it dawned on her what manner of animal yielded that shape of meat.

Not far from there, Valentine espied something like an emaciated human. It could pass for a ghoul, a Commonwealth ghoul or an Ankh-Morpork ghoul. The clothing was dirtied and tattered enough that he couldn’t tell. It moaned, “So… hungry…”

That was more intelligence than a feral Commonwealth ghoul had. As they crouched behind a fallen log, Valentine murmured, “Going to have to go the long way around again and hope he doesn’t get the drop on us like that last ugly.”

“Why don’t we just ask him for directions?” said Sybil.

“‘Cos he’s hungry, and you’re edible?” said Valentine, incredulous.

“Nonsense, that’s stereotyping,” Sybil chided, and she walked confidently toward the cachectic figure. “Hallo, I don’t suppose you could tell us where we are?”

The head of the cadaverous figure swivelled to look at Sybil, and the rest of its body slowly followed. It said, “You will feed me.”

Sybil thought quickly and said, “There’s a camp with meat back that way.” She gestured. “The owner won’t be coming back.”

It folded its hands and demanded, “Show me.”

Valentine gave Sybil a questioning look.

She said, matter of fact, “The dead are dead. We can’t help them now,” but there was a wetness to her eyes.

They led the scrawny humanoid to the campsite, and they both looked away. When it was done, it wiped its mouth delicately on the tatters of its clothing and said, “You’re in Fairyland, in the blasted land between the Empty Court of the Queen and the Court of the King.”

“Please, our husband has been taken. How may we find him?” asked Sybil.

The creature shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Y’know a guy dressed in heliotrope?” asked Valentine.

“I know a flower that follows the sun, but there is no sun here,” said the creature.

“You don’t say,” Valentine muttered.

“Is there a location here where someone might be held?” asked Sybil.

“Closer than friends, closer than enemies, dear as dinner?” replied the creature, smiling with a mouth of too-sharp teeth, prominent against wasted gums. 

Valentine decided to go broader, “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary around here?”

“Besides you two?” said the creature.

“Point,” Valentine admitted.

“I see a story. I see a story hungry for your pain, even as I hunger for your lady’s sweet flesh and blood, for I am the _fear gorta_ , and I spring from the _féar gortach_ , the hungry grass where Famine has stepped,” said the _fear gorta_ , “but you have fed me, and so I will say unto you - continue your wandering, and the story will have its teeth into you soon enough.”

In their wandering, they found a river, and they followed it. Valentine sighted what he thought was a radstag, for the stag had two heads. As they approached closer, he saw that while the stag did have two heads, only one was alive. Flies buzzed around the other head, hanging from the live head’s antlers. The stag must have locked an opponent in combat and torn off its head, only to be saddled with it, the albatross around its neck.

Valentine cursed, unable to catch himself. 

The stag’s ears flicked, and its live head swivelled to condescend a withering glance upon Valentine and Sybil. The stag walked towards them, confident in its status as king of the forest, and Valentine could see it was scrawny.

“The poor dear must not be able to feed well, dragging that dead weight around,” said Sybil.

“Poor dear, sure, sure,” Valentine muttered, wanting to bolt as it approached.

It sat down in front of them and looked up expectantly. Sybil immediately went to untangle the severed head, which the animal allowed her to do. The moment the decaying head was off, the stag attempted to gore Sybil with its horns, but Valentine grabbed her by the hand and dragged her away. The stag chased them along the water’s edge, but even with it starving and fly-bitten, bipeds weren’t going to outrun a quadruped.

Valentine paused a moment to grab a river rock and flung it back at the stag, which wailed like a banshee. Then he looked forward again and kept running. Behind him, the sound of hoofbeats resumed.

But ahead was a platform with diamond plate and a heavy gear design etched into the middle. Valentine ran for it and desperately searched for the activation mechanism. Getting into an unopened Vault required a Pip-Boy, but Valentine rolled up his sleeves and ripped some wiring from his arm and jammed it down into the socket for the Pip-Boy’s plug.

“Come on, fluency in ‘uncooperative old machine’, don’t fail me now,” Valentine prayed.

The hoofbeats drummed louder.

With the shrieking of metal, the Vault door yielded to his untender hacking ministrations, and Valentine and Sybil descended into darkness.

62 [Rad rabbits?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%BAca)

63 [Watchers?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluagh)

64 [Gunners?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ly_Erg)

* * *

“There shouldn’t have been an elf in the first place. Fairyland was severed from the Discworld not even a year ago,” Ponder said, somewhat petulantly.

He would have said that the wizards of Unseen University should have seen an elf wandering the grounds, and then he thought about all the wizards he knew.

There was seeing, and there was _seeing_.

Ponder had drafted DiMA to help him, insofar as the mechanical student wasn’t in a food coma, and he was often helpful, sort of like a portable, less-powerful HEX, but he’d brought along his nephews, and Ponder had been unable to stop a number of other people from following. The lawyer Morecombe had followed DiMA and the boys. Ridcully wanted to hunt down the elf personally. The Patrician desired to see his Commander of the Watch and the highest born lady of his city returned. Captains Carrot, Angua, and Sally of the Watch had a similar sentiment, but the Watchmen had an added condition - they wanted Constable Valentine back as well. The Constable was _theirs_. And that Captain Sally had brought along her girlfriend, one Piper Wright, who was press…

A student wizard in sunglasses had just shown up. Ponder didn’t know who he was. The student was probably _his_ student, Ponder thought gloomily. He couldn’t keep track of how many students he had, anymore. They just showed up at his office and demanded that he sort out their credit requirements. In the old days, apprentices would have recovered rare ingredients for their masters, at great peril. Ponder didn’t miss those days, exactly, but he could have done with fewer students knocking on his door and demanding to be allowed to count Post-Mortem Communications as a language credit, too, when they were already counting it as a fine arts credit.

Ponder hazarded, to the crowd, “It’s not that dimensional travel is difficult, per se. Certainly, it’s quite easy to travel to Hell. We just don’t want to.”

“Yeah, I’ll say,” the reporter agreed.

Around the Great Big Thing, DiMA was obediently setting up the equipment that Ponder had requested. The older of his two nephews was clinging a hand to DiMA’s robe, which was somewhat getting in the way, and the younger of the two kept stopping DiMA every 10 seconds for explanations of what DiMA was doing and when would Father and Mother and Dad be back.

Irritatedly, Ponder directed the student wizard in the sunglasses, “Go help DiMA. Anyway, as I was saying. Dimensional travel isn’t exactly dragon magic. Breaching into the Dungeon Dimensions is practically child’s play -”

“DiMA, why can’t you just teleport Father and Mother and Dad back?” asked young Sam.

Ponder chose to answer that question for DiMA, because DiMA ought to have been busy calibrating the glamour quotient, anyway, “We don’t know where they are.”

“Didn’t you say they went to Fairyland?” asked Captain Carrot, a copper trying to get the story straight.

“Likely, likely, but if you approximate Fairyland as an infinite plane -” Ponder attempted.

“Why would you do that?” demanded Ridcully. “Don’t make more of it than there needs to be.”

“I’m not making more of it, sir, I’m explaining why we can’t precisely pinpoint where they are. Now, I’m hoping that we can trace the thaumic path that was perforated between the Discworld and Fairyland in the Great Hall using the Great Big Thing - ” Ponder tried to continue.

“The Great Big Thing? From the Challenger Project, which cost, oh, do remind me?” the Patrician said delicately.

“I’d rather not,” Ponder muttered, and then he again raised his voice, “but we’ll only have until around 1:08.4 AM to retrieve them. At that point, the Great Hall will refold into its semi-original conformation, and we’ll lose the trace. Gentlemen...” he looked at Captains Angua and Sally and the reporter and added, as an afterthought, “ladies, we may have put an orangutan on the moon, but finding three specific people in another dimension _and_ retrieving them _intact_ , is going to be like retrieving a needle from a haystack on a sorghum farm.”

“Don’t see why we can’t just go anywhere in Fairyland and shake them down until they tell us where they’ve gone,” said Ridcully.

“At this point, I’m not even sure if we’d arrive in Fairyland if we fired up the great Big Thing and attempted to re-perforate the same path taken. Dimensions loop and spiral around each other -” Ponder attempted.

“Like spaghetti?” asked young Sam.

The reporter wrote that down.

Ponder waved it off, “If you like, and, er, the wrong dimension might be where Fairyland had been, indeed, a very wrong dimension -”

“Hex can do the math,” DiMA said quietly. “The 11-dimensional spatial rotations. They’re not hard. We can plot where Fairyland is relative to where it was at the time of the initial portal, sir.”

DiMA was good with simulation work and mathematical predictions. He was very exacting with spell targeting as well, for that matter. He was a useful student.

“But we’re still discussing going to Fairyland, a plane of existence inimical to our own, without exact coordinates. We could end up inside a rock - and that wouldn’t even be the worst outcome,” Ponder speculated.

DiMA handed the student in sunglasses a sheet of paper and said, “Take this to Hex. And I should clarify, sir. I mean to say that Hex can calculate those coordinates, give or take, oh, 50 feet. The portal will open roughly where the elf took Commander Vimes, Lady Sybil, and my brother, supposing, of course, that we can manifest a portal. Sir.”

* * *

The stag went crashing into the darkness headlong after Sybil and Valentine, so ‘scram’ was the word the moment the elevator hit ground. The inner Vault door was already open, the bridge extended, but the door to the overseer’s office was closed, maybe even locked, so they both ran the long walk to the cryopods. Sybil panted, more blood burbling through the ascot wrapped around her arm, while Valentine’s systems hit several hard redlines.

The stag might have broken a leg in its leap down after them, but maddened, the quadruped ran after them, keen on making their destiny the glue factory, not its. Servos screaming at him, Valentine ran just to the other side of the Sole Survivor’s pod and as the stag charged him, he slammed the lid down on the king of the forest. The stag bellowed in fury and thrashed, hooves denting the pod from inside, as the ice slowly took it.

Sybil, when she caught her breath, noticed the one other open cryo-pod, which held a dead duplicate of herself, the wig and wedding ring missing.

Valentine guiltily fidgeted with the ring on his own left hand. “I’m sure he told you the story,” and he was equally sure he didn’t tell her the whole story; Vimes wasn’t one to put his problems on other people, “but he watched you die, while he was entombed in there,” he gestured to where the the stag was freezing. “He took me to see you. To see your body. I, heh, asked him a few questions, when I saw the scars on your head.” Valentine rubbed the back of his head. So he was a suspicious bastard.

Sybil hugged him and put her head against his shoulder and cried. Valentine awkwardly wrapped his arms around her. “Hey, chin up. It must be tough, seeing your own dead body.”

“It’s not that. It’s that our Sam had to see it,” Sybil murmured. She let him go and readied herself, looking back to the hallway.

God, but that woman had a spine of steel.

Valentine expected the scent of decaying radroach corpses. What hit him instead was a sickly sweet lemon-lime, like aspartame and the fetor of a dying breath. A glowing mote of nuclear green light beelined right at them and hit hard, trying to bite, a chittering thing of radiance and rage. Valentine pulled it off himself, and it crushed in his hand, the air exploding with rotten citrus.

More followed, and Sybil batted her way through them with her broadsword, muttering, “ _Sprites._ ”

Valentine couldn’t help laughing. “Oh. Of course. Pixies and pixels...”

They went right in the hallway, to where the power generators’ electric coils could be seen through a window. Sprites pelted them. Vimes had wanted to tear off Valentine’s wedding suit, but the sprites were doing a tooth-and-nail job of ripping it up themselves, and Sybil wouldn’t be getting another use of that blue dress, no matter how much she loved reusing items.

As they explored and lost blood and fabric to the tiny terrors, Valentine found a truncheon, which he carried off-handed. Eventually, they’d looked everywhere except one place, and the door was locked. Valentine held out his hand and directed Sybil, “Spare me some of your bobby pins?”

“Bobby pins?” Sybil looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean my sammie pins?” She pulled a few out from her wig.

“Sammie pins?” Valentine said incredulously, taking the pins. Policemen were called Sammies, after his Vimes. His Vimes was the _Old Sam_ , the law itself. And bobby pins were called sammie pins? He set it in the lock.

“Oh, yes. Sam brought some back from the Commonwealth, and a friend of mine in the pin business started up making them here. They sell very well, she tells me,” said Sybil. She raised an elegant eyebrow at Valentine’s attempts at the lock. “An… interesting skill you have there.”

Valentine grunted, “Sam’s better at lockpicking than I am.”

Sybil blinked. She had certain blind spots with regards to their husband.

“I swear, him picking locks had to be at least 10% of our flirting…” Valentine mumbled, as he tried to nudge the tumblers into position.

The door to the Overseer’s office opened, and they saw Vimes bound down tight to the Overseer’s chair, a helmet like DiMA’s interface helmet on his head, blood oozing slowly down his face. A slender figure in a purple Vault suit stood behind him. On the security monitors, they saw themselves at the door.

“As I was saying, your mind’s difficult to read - and what would your lemans think, if they knew why? - but hers is easy,” said Heliotrope, and he sang.

Only it wasn’t music.

Sybil’s grip on the broadsword changed, and she swung it overhand at Valentine, who dropped and swept his legs at her ankles. 

Vimes shouted, “No!”

“Sybil, sweetheart, can’t we talk this over like rational adults?” Valentine pleaded, even as he rolled into a crouch, the baton in his off hand.

“Talk? What’s there to talk about? You’re surplus to requirements,” Sybil said, smiling kindly, all white teeth, “My Sam doesn’t need you.”

“No, I do. I do! Sybil, please -” Vimes begged, horrified.

Valentine darted over the Overseer’s desk, as she lunged again. 

“Now Sam, you know that I know better than you do. You deserve better than trash,” Sybil chided, climbing atop the desk and peering down at Valentine, without hate, without even malice, but with a great deal of pity.

Valentine knew she wore the same expression when she culled dragons who didn’t fit into her breeding plans.

“Sybil, this isn’t you,” Valentine reasoned, but the words cut as deep as the sword she was trying to put into him. He blocked a blow with the truncheon, but he knew how this was going to end, from the play-sparring they’d engaged in, in their months together, as one happy household.

“Oh no, this is the me I should have been ages ago. Put an end to all of this silliness. As if a tinker-toy could ever be worthy of my Sam,” Sybil said firmly.

Valentine darted past her, and a clean swipe took off his coattails. Heliotrope was sort of hard to see, like he didn’t want to be seen, but steel fist met narrow elfen jaw, and when Valentine laid Heliotrope out, Sybil paused and blinked. She looked at the sword in her hands, and hazily, she asked, “What was I doing?”

“Not sure I wanna tell you, doll. Don’t think I want to give you any more big ideas,” said Valentine guardedly, and he knelt at Vimes’s side, untying the knots that bit into his lean flesh.

“Oh gods,” Vimes moaned in relief as the ropes started to slip. “Sybil! Nick! I, ah… gods. Let’s get out of here.”

Sybil stalked over to Heliotrope, who was groaning on the floor, and she hefted the broadsword up.

“No!” Vimes said sharply. “What he just did to you was monstrous, dear, but there are grieving families in Ankh-Morpork. We’ll bring him back. He’ll have the Patrician’s justice. It’s the only thing to do.”

Valentine let out a low whistle, and he felt at the back of his belt for the pair of handcuffs that he’d always carried on him since that Tektus debacle. If only he’d thought to bring a crossbow with him to his wedding.

“What he did to me?” asked Sybil, puzzled. Then she noticed Nick’s handcuffs and gave Vimes an inquiring look.

“It’s not like that,” Vimes said hastily, rubbing his hands and arms as they pinked back up with blood.

“It’s exactly like that,” Valentine corrected, pulling the elf’s hands behind him and cuffing him.

“It’s sometimes like that,” Vimes admitted, as Sybil helped him up.

“Hey there, shithead! Er… sorry, Sybil. You’re under arrest! This may be a foreign concept to you. It means that if you don’t shut up, we can and will use it against you. You have the right to a lawyer. Good luck with that,” Valentine said wearily, hauling up the elf, who didn’t seem to be able to stand.

“Your hand’s steel, isn’t it?” asked Sybil, pensively.

“Stainless, yeah,” said Valentine, rubbing his wrist. He needed to redo some of his wiring.

“And the handcuffs?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Valentine.

“Oh good,” said Sybil.

Vimes understood what Sybil was insinuating, and he looked over at his ceremonial armour, which had been cut off him. He smiled, unpleasantly. “I think we ought to go ahead and put my helmet on him. For good measure. For his own safety. So he doesn’t bump his head.”

They did, improvising with some rope. Heliotrope convulsed in pain, all that steel up close and personal with his ferrophobic little head. If Heliotrope hadn’t just tried to have Sybil murder him in front of Vimes, Valentine would have almost called it cruelty to a prisoner. Almost.

Species-specific restraints weren’t anything new to the Watch, anyway. Shackles that would hold a human wouldn’t hold a vampire, especially a vampire who had gone blooddrinker, and the methods the Watch had to use to put a troll in lock-up were something to behold.

“Now Nick, you know none of that was true,” Vimes offered, in what Valentine suspected was meant to be reassurance, although Vimes himself was clearly shaken.

Well, who wouldn’t be?

Valentine slipped his arm around Vimes’s waist.

Heliotrope hissed, “She only said what your false human politeness wouldn’t allow her to say otherwise.” 

Sybil looked at the sword in her hand and the way Valentine’s coattails had been trimmed. “Oh dear. I did something untoward, didn’t I?”

“That wasn’t you, dear. That never could have been you,” said Vimes, who clearly wanted that to be true.

Heliotrope singsonged, “I told him he’d had to pick one to leave behind.” He paused. “He did.”

“You have a right to remain silent. You ought to use it,” Vimes said irritably.

Valentine took back his arm and looked at it, trying to think about what sort of repairs he’d need. Probably some repairs to his head, he thought, and to the heart he didn’t have. 

A second search of Vault 111 turned up three stimpacks. One, by agreement of Valentine and Vimes, was put to use on Sybil. Then they dragged Heliotrope off, and they started walking.

* * *

Going to Hell was easy. It was going almost anywhere else that was difficult. The Librarian had come around with a pile of books, which Ponder had skimmed through and DiMA and the student in sunglasses would walk off to Hex to dump into the arcane mainframe’s hopper for scanning.

“The problem,” Ponder said, “is the chance of creating a standing wave deformity.”

“So have it sit down,” Ridcully blustered.

“I mean that we could end up with a permanent portal to Fairyland in the Great Hall, sir,” Ponder said reproachfully. He still had nightmares about elves, sometimes. They went in his diary.

“I shouldn’t like that for the city of Ankh-Morpork,” said the Patrician, lightly inflected.

“Come on now. We must have Sam and Sybil back,” said Ridcully, firmly.

“Yeah, sure, just forget Nick Valentine. That’s cool,” said the student in sunglasses.

“DiMA, is there a reason we’re not pulling enough thaums on the squash court?” Ponder said, looking up from nineteen different spells that he’d cribbed together from twelve separate incunables. Seven of the spells were in different languages, four of which Ponder did not actually speak.

“I would conjecture that it would have something to do with the unauthorized user accessing the Great Big Thing and siphoning a week’s worth of power off the squash court, sir,” DiMA said mildly, still surrounded by young Sam, Shaun, and the lawyer.

Ponder sighed, “If this portal doesn’t result in a standing wave deformity, I don’t know if it’ll stay open long enough to accomplish anything useful.”

“Nonsense, we’ll have Sam and Sybil back in time for supper,” said Ridcully.

Ridcully had dug up six more semi-conscious wizards of fourth level or higher, and with him and Ponder, that made eight, enough for a ritual casting of an Arcane Gate. Ridcully had managed to scrounge up the Senior Wrangler; the Lecturer in Recent Runes; Dr. Hix, who had slipped the reporter some of his community theatre pamphlets; the Chair of Indefinite Studies; the Professor of Recondite Phenomena; and the Professor of Illiberal Studies. The Bursar wasn’t in a food coma, but he did startle very, very badly around Ridcully these days.

The reporter was trying to ask a lot of questions; Ponder let Dr. Hix deal with her. Perhaps that was unfair of Ponder to Dr. Hix, but he had to drown out the chaos and stay focused.

The thing about ritual magic, which Ponder was very, very glad more people didn’t know, was that anyone could do it. Get together enough people and some belief, and a sufficient will could lense it into something else. Ponder didn’t need the green smoke, which the student in sunglasses had set up. He didn’t need the cauldron, the dribbly candles that DiMA was shooing the little girl reporter away from, enticing her to play a card game with young Sam and Shaun.

But the theatre made it all work in the older Faculty’s minds, and a wizard could put flesh on his dreams.

There was a whoosh of cold air and the rustle of wind through wheat. A portal opened.

“...ouch, that’s very bright,” said young Sam to DiMA, rubbing his eyes.

Ponder was going to have to think about that later. Chaining together nineteen different ritual spells that weren’t designed to work together and, in fact, took a certain delight in pushing each other down the stairs and then running up and blaming it on each other, took considerable concentration.

“There would appear to be an open portal in the Great Hall,” observed the Patrician.

“We don’t know that it even goes to the correct dimension, let alone near the correct spot in that dimension,” cautioned Ponder, who had broken a sweat.

The Watchmen conferred, and Captain Angua stepped through. She came back after a moment, and she said, “They were there.”

“So we’ll go get them?” asked Shaun, looking speculatively at the portal.

Someone flung an elf in handcuffs with a ceremonial helmet, complete with tattered plumes, through the portal. Then Lady Sybil stumbled through, followed by Valentine, who appeared to have been pushed. The Patrician looked slightly irritated.

Then Commander Vimes staggered out and commanded, “Carrot, Angua, Sally, if you’d take Mr. Heliotrope to a jail cell? I’m sure Lord Vetinari will have an appointment soon.”

Ponder stopped concentrating on the portal and started thinking about how he was going to write all of this up.

The portal remained open. Ponder reached out and gently poked Runes, because it seemed safer than poking Ridcully. Honestly, none of the Faculty appeared to be concentrating anymore, if they ever had been. The portal remained open. Ponder rubbed his head. He had a headache, and he felt very, very drained.

Ponder looked at the time, and he suggested to all and sundry, “I think we should exit the Great Hall.”

They did. The Great Hall folded back up. As it did, the portal sheared in the air, coming apart into pieces, which slowly shriveled up, like salted slugs.

“I think we shouldn’t unfold the Great Hall again for a long, long time,” said Ponder, when the screeching stopped.

“There’s a birthday party scheduled next week, Mr. Stibbons,” said Ridcully.

“Oh,” said Ponder. “That’s unfortunate.”

* * *

After young Sam and Shaun were quite reassured that their parents were there and whole - and Shaun required quite a bit of reassuring - and were put to bed, Vimes slumped in the middle of the loveseat in the Yellow Drawing room, Sybil on one side and Valentine on the other. He lolled his head back, staring up at the ceiling.

An elf had tried to grab young Sam, Vimes had gotten in the way, because _sod that_ , the elf had dragged him off into something out of his more coherent nightmares and slapped a spiked colander on his head, and he’d found out that Sybil had some rather unusual ideas about the courtship of dragonriders and that Valentine apparently really, really wanted to patrol with Vimes, solving crimes. That second item wasn’t really news to Vimes, although he felt somewhat uncomfortably flattered by just how much Valentine was into that.

And then Vimes had watched Sybil try to kill Valentine in front of his eyes, while under the influence.

But Heliotrope was in a jail cell, and there were at least three murders they could definitely pin on him and dozens more that they could link, so there’d be the Patrician’s court for him and then a hemp fandango. 

Neither Sybil nor Valentine really needed to have come rescue him, Vimes thought, and he had told them so, but they had insisted that they did, and as they had trekked back, with their captive in tow, he had eventually given up. He would have done the same if either of them had been in danger. Vimes couldn’t blame them for doing as he would have done. Now they were all home again.

Valentine was a bit withdrawn, fiddling with his wrist. Vimes pulled his hand aside and scooted onto his lap. He kissed Valentine again, a better kiss than he’d managed in public. Vimes admitted, “I did pick someone to leave behind, if it came to that. I picked _me_. But it didn’t come to that, and I owe you a wedding night, don’t I?”

“ _Sam_ ,” Sybil and Valentine both said, chiding and scolding. Sybil continued, “You couldn’t do that!”

“Yes, I could. It’s my life. But I didn’t have to, and it’s a moot point now,” said Vimes.

Valentine shifted slightly awkwardly. “I’m really not worth -”

“Yes. You are,” Vimes said firmly, locking his gaze with Valentine.

They held the gaze for a moment. Then Vimes leaned over and kissed Sybil, as well, and said, “Thank you, dear. For everything. I, ah...” He wanted to apologize, and he wasn’t sure why. He seethed that she’d been injured, over what Heliotrope had done to her. He wanted to say that she didn’t have to come after him.

But she’d chosen to do so, and Vimes would just have to accept that was Sybil’s choice. That _he_ remained Sybil’s choice, despite his choice in men.

His choice in men needn’t have come for Vimes, either, but Valentine had, and Vimes would have to accept that, too.

Vimes really was quite lucky, all things said.

* * *

Poor, dead Kyanite had no known next of kin, as was the case with many of the musicians and other creative types most likely slain by the elf Heliotrope, who even now was under iron lock and key, in an iron helmet, and surrounded by four steady guards, the sort who wouldn’t get bored or fall asleep, and who wore their own iron helmets. The elf had been brought in by Mister Vimes and his Valentine. Mister Vimes did love arresting people, and it was nice to see that he was sharing things he loved with his new husband so soon.

Humans might call that a _ménage à trois_ , if they were feeling particularly lobster that day; trolls might call it a conglomerate. Either way, Mister Vimes was the same angry Mister Vimes who’d arrest the sun if he caught it looking at him funny, and Detritus and Ruby, with their adopted son Brick, knew a thing or two about families that didn’t fit the standard format. Folks still occasionally gave Detritus grief over having an adopted son but no natural children of his own, though they never gave him grief about it more than once.

Gneiss had called Kyanite a sister, in perhaps a metaphorical sense. Now, Detritus could tell that Gneiss was a _metamorphic_ rock, in a very specific sense, and that she’d had plaster work done, but she didn’t seem to be doing crimes with her pretty new face, so that made her an Upstanding Citizen, and that meant that Detritus had a Duty to Uphold to the Mostly Law-Abiding Public.

Mostly, Detritus wanted to tell her that they had Heliotrope in custody and that, as long as the Patrician did what the city was all but demanding him to, Heliotrope would be going for a short, sharp swing ride. A proper troll execution might be a bit messier, but it would have been no less quick.

Finding her was a bit of a problem. Gneiss was a lounge singer of No Fixed Abode. She was registered with the Musicians’ Guild, but they were a mess of a Guild and no help at all. However, Detritus’s wife, Ruby, was what passed as a celebrity among trolls. She’d been a very big deal during that whole clickies business. Detritus didn’t remember it too well, and he would have chalked that down to not having his cooling helmet back then, but _no one_ seemed to remember that business too well, which made Detritus feel better.

Upon complaining to his wife about his trouble tracking down Gneiss to give her the good news, Ruby thought for a moment and said, “Can probably find out where she singing tonight.”

“You know she singing tonight?” asked Detritus, surprised.

Ruby snorted. “She nightingale. Of course she singing tonight.”

So Ruby asked a few of her friends, who asked a few of their friends, and in short order, Detritus had tracked down Gneiss. Ruby, who sang only a few nights a week and only at very high end troll venues and even some mixed race venues, came along, and when Detritus was ready to barge on stage to talk to Gneiss, Ruby held Detritus back, her hand clasped firmly on his arm.

They listened to Gneiss’s set. It wasn’t bad, but Gneiss was no Ruby, of course. The copper in Detritus watched the crowd. It skewed poor, and he saw more plaster work in it than he usually expected, but it was funny - he wasn’t seeing the known criminals that he associated with plaster work. Moreover, while it skewed poor, most of the trolls had put real effort into doing what they could for fashion on a limited budget, including a number of fierce tiger’s eye looks that, Ruby whispered to him, took _hours_ to pull off. A number of the crowd eyed Detritus warily, but no matter how much he eyed them back, no Clues fell out of their handbags. He felt cheated.

At the end, Ruby allowed Detritus to approach Gneiss, and he said cheerily, “Good news! Her Kyanite killer in der Big House.”

Gneiss looked over at Ruby with more interest than she looked at Detritus, which was often the case when Detritus went about in public with his wife. He was a _ghuhg_ lucky troll, he knew that. Gneiss asked, “Dat so?”

“Yup. Everyone say der Patrician gonna hang him. It dat glitter ponce,” said Detritus. Troll memories were long. When humans forgot about elves, trolls remembered. He sure wasn’t going to say ‘elf’ out loud.

“Huh. Guess the Watch do something. Surprise, surprise. Well, we have got backlog for you, Sarge. So much backlog it strata,” said Gneiss, hands on her hips.

“Oh, glitter ponce do more murders?” asked Detritus. Trolls hated elves, with good reason. It only made sense that if Gneiss had other dead friends, the elf had probably killed them, too. Why look too far when there was already a murderer in hand?

Gneiss regarded him narrowly. “Got murders going forward65 for years, copper. Don’t think glitter ponce in town that long.”

Detritus considered. It was never good to give up on a theory just because of some inconvenient facts. “Maybe him wear disguises.”

Ruby sighed. “Detritus, you cooling helmet working okay? Why you being so dumb? It barely spring; it not that hot yet.”

“Well. That better reaction den expect from copper,” Gneiss admitted. “He wrong, but at least he got spirit.”

“Detritus, nightingales always go missing. Got own reasons not want go to flatfoots,” chided Ruby.

That they had reasons to avoid the Watch was suspicious in and of itself, but if it meant that they weren’t reporting murders, perhaps some good will was in order. It wasn’t as if they were dealing troll drugs, Detritus’s major hot button. “Well. Watch gone to you now.”

“Guess so,” said Gneiss, smiling faintly. “Guess us got some things to discuss.”

65 The trollish perspective on time is that the past is in front, because it can be seen, and the future is behind.

* * *

As the tub in his dressing room was filling with water, lovely, warm water, Vimes opened the brown envelope that DiMA had given him. There was a note written in DiMA’s neat not-handwriting: 

> Commander Vimes,
> 
> You should know that the Unseen University files the notes of every wizard in the library. The notes are poorly filed. Many of them are moldy. I was, however, fairly easily able to obtain Mister Stibbons’s notes on you. I have included them here for you.

Vimes flipped through the rest of the included papers, pausing on reading DiMA’s letter. Ponder’s handwriting was legible, but damned if Vimes could make sense of any of it. It was all equations and bar charts and…

A pencil sketch of the Summoning Dark, of the sigil that was seared into his flesh. It pulsed, once, at seeing itself. Vimes withdrew his lighter and burned the piece of paper, letting the ashes fall in his sink. He looked at DiMA’s letter again.

> Mister Stibbons’s conclusions are of interest. There are two quasidemonic entities that share your mind.

Two?

> One is called the Summoning Dark. The other will be called.
> 
> I would ask - if a quasidemon is nothing but a complicated sort of thought looking for the correct mind to think it, what constitutes the correct mind? What, then, does that say of you, Commander Vimes?
> 
> I love my brother. I would do almost anything for him. If the city of Ankh-Morpork would throw such an utter purile fit over a sameness of sex and difference of species and a multiplicity of love what, then would it do if it knew what lies inside your mind? What would it do to Nick?
> 
> I shouldn’t like to know. With that goal in mind, I have given these notes to you and replaced the ones in the library with a treatise on tato farming. I have forgotten. Do not give me recourse to remember.
> 
> Regards,  
>  DiMA, Graduate Student Wizard First Class, Unseen University

Vimes crumpled up the piece of paper.

_As I was saying, your mind’s difficult to read - and what would your lemans think, if they knew why?_ Heliotrope had said.

Maybe he’d tell Sybil and Valentine someday. They might understand. It wouldn’t be today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter, **chapter 23** , contains **sexually explicit content**. If that’s not for you, feel free to rejoin us for a quick wrap-up in chapter 24, and then it’s on to the next fic!
> 
> **S:** I would like to talk about this passage here from Wee Free Men:
>
>>   
> And things were not…finished. Like the trees in the forest they were heading toward, for example. A tree is a tree, she thought. Close up or far away, it’s a tree. It has bark and branches and roots. And you know they’re there, even if the tree is so far away that it’s a blob.
>> 
>> The trees here, though, were different. She had a strong feeling that they were blobs, and were growing the roots and twigs and other details as she got closer, as if they were thinking, “Quick, someone’s coming! Look real!”
>> 
>> It was like being in a painting where the artist hadn’t bothered much with the things in the distance, but quickly rushed a bit of realness anywhere you were looking.
> 
> [Known video game nerd Terry Pratchett](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-29-the-story-behind-the-oblivion-mod-terry-pratchett-worked-on) made it **canon** that his fairy-land had rendering problems like a video game. :|
> 
>  **S:** By the way, we’ve updated **chapter 4** with artwork. I have to admit, I’m particularly proud of this one, so feel free to head back and check it out!
> 
> **A:** Again, Vimes loves Sybil and Valentine equally, but he’s bad at expressing this sentiment.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	23. Wedding Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Remember To Breathe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAHenpGhCVA&list=PLLEELrwJ-Fyr6XhqoNPT5qasUukTof7r_&index=36&t=0s) by Sturgill Simpson. 
> 
> **This chapter contains sexually explicit content.** If that’s not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us here with **chapter 24**!
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Wedding Night_

Vimes had a cup of coffee and a cup of willow bark tea and a bubble bath to scrub off the blood and the grime, and when it was done he felt almost human again. Nick changed, not into his usual faded blue nightgown but into ‘something more comfortable’, which really amounted to a nicer version of the typical hat, shirt, tie, trousers, suspenders, and socks that he usually wore. Vimes just pulled on a nightgown, the plum one, although he wondered why he bothered, because he had every intention of taking it off in a few minutes. Nick sat on the edge of their bed, fiddling nervously with his tie. Vimes sighed happily and let his gaze rove over his husband. His husband! He had one. It was a giddy thought. “That’s much better.”

“Did I look that bad?” asked Nick, a little sadness tugging at the corners of his eyes

“Oh,” said Vimes, blinking. “Oh, no. Of course not, Nick. You looked…” he searched for the word, “...proper. I just don’t much like the dress of the aristocracy.” He sat down next to Nick on the edge of the bed and reached up to stroke Nick’s jawline.

“I felt ridiculous,” admitted Nick, “but I had to make the effort. The look of the thing is halfway the thing itself.”

Vimes kissed him again and reached around his head to hold him, and then said, smirking, “You feel fine, to me.”

Vimes reached for Nick’s tie, pulling him in close for more liplock. There was something to be said for a lover who didn’t need to breathe. Nick ran a hand through Vimes’s hair and then pulled away when Vimes winced; he was going to have some sore spots there for a while, Vimes was sure, courtesy of that awful spiked helmet. Nick’s hand worked its way down the back of his neck, to between his shoulder blades, and rubbed. Vimes pushed back into the kneading.

“I love you, Nick. Perhaps I don’t say that enough,” Vimes hazarded.

Nick smiled that smile of his that could make Vimes melt. “I love you, too, sweetheart. Maybe it’s harder for some to say than others.”

“Perhaps, but you deserve to have it said to you when you can hear it,” Vimes said, rubbing his thumb over Nick’s cheek, feeling the structure of the metal skull under the pliant synthetic flesh. Nick made excuses for Vimes, but Vimes didn’t feel entitled to that luxury. “I apologize if I’ve made that a question for you, between us. My feelings for you should never be a weapon for an enemy to use against you.”

“I shouldn’t doubt you,” Nick murmured, kissing down Vimes’s neck. He and his metal teeth were the one man with sharp metal objects that Vimes would let close to his neck, he was sure.

“I shouldn’t give you cause to doubt,” Vimes said, and he tried to think about what that entailed. Being there, for one thing. The lucky thing about Nick, Sam supposed, was that Nick took being assigned on an eight hour patrol in the freezing rain with Vimes, dealing with crimes such as money laundering in the third degree and mail tampering, as counting as better than a romantic date. For every patrol where they interrupted an attempted murder and Vimes felt like they were actually accomplishing something, there were a dozen patrols where there was nothing but the cold and all being unwell. But Nick loved it, the gods bless him.

“I do that to myself,” Nick admitted, slipping a hand under the hem of Vimes’s gown and up his thigh, “but I can believe in you.”

It was a trust he felt unworthy of, but to say as much would have been a criminal ingratitude. Vimes unclipped Nick’s suspenders and unbuttoned his trousers. “Thank you for agreeing to be my husband. You’ve been so understanding.” More understanding than he deserved.

“Y’really think the hubbub’ll all settle down?” asked Nick, stroking the inside of Vimes’s thigh.

“Some. Eventually,” said Vimes. Ankh-Morpork loved its theatre of cruelty, but its attention span was very, very short. For example, Cheery still drew some flak, even in Ankh-Morpork, from the more conservative dwarfs, but there were plenty, Vimes included, who would throw words or hands, if necessary, to defend her. Nothing was perfect, but it got better, with time.

He pulled Nick’s trousers down to his knees and slid his hand into his drawers, feeling for that delightful package he’d reaccustomed himself to over the three months of their engagement. Nick gasped; he was wonderfully responsive. Vimes kissed him some more. With his free hand, he tugged Nick’s tie loose and discarded it onto the bed for possible future use. Then he started to unbutton Nick’s shirt so that he could trail his mouth down Nick’s chest. 

“Anything in specific you wanted for our wedding night, doll?” asked Nick, looking down at Vimes’s progress.

“You know I like meat,” said Vimes, grinning.

His grin didn’t seem to scare Nick. Vimes scooted off the bed and onto his knees on the floor before Nick. He pulled Nick’s drawers down and put his head between Nick’s thighs, taking his cock in hand. Vimes pulled back the synthetic foreskin and sucked on the tip, licking his tongue around the crown.

“Oh sweetheart…” Nick moaned, as Vimes stroked his shaft.

Vimes rubbed him from base to tip and fondled his balls and sucked along the side of his shaft and then took his cock as deep in his mouth as he knew he could manage without gagging. He teased Nick, without pity or mercy. He tormented him to hardness, Nick’s hands digging into his shoulders, and he tormented him some more. Vimes knew what his lover’s lines were, there and no farther, and he skirted them, but he did not cross them.

Nick’s metal hand unclasped his shoulder and switched to the edge of the bed, digging in harder than might have been safe for Vimes’s shoulder. His servos whined, and his fans stuttered, his hydraulics begging for release. “D’ya want me to come in your mouth? ‘Cos this is how you get me to come in your mouth.”

Vimes took his mouth off Nick’s cock a moment, rubbing it up against the side of his cheek instead and said, “Tempting. But no. You can come up my arse.” He let Nick go and went to their nightstand for a sonky and the bottle of lube.

“Then you can ride me,” Nick replied, “and show me just how much you want this synthetic dick.”

Sonky and lube in hand, Vimes pushed Nick from the edge of the bed to the middle and shoved him down, pinning him a moment. He reached down and slid the sonky over Nick’s member. Vimes took a moment, fingering himself and making sure his arse was well-lubricated before slicking lube over Nick’s neatly sonky-wrapped prick. He lined Nick’s cock up with his bottom eye and pushed back.

Gods, but Vimes loved that fullness of Nick’s hard manhood in him. For a moment, he straddled Nick on the bed, just like that, breathing heavily. Oh, he’d done this before. There was nothing in particular that they’d waited for the wedding to do, although Nick’s naughty book had a few positions that they still hadn’t tried or that Vimes wanted to retry with their positions reversed.

The difference now was that Nick was his lawfully wedded husband. _His._ Nick grabbed Vimes’s hips and tugged him down, even as he bucked his hips up, giving Vimes that last bit of length. To think he’d been afraid of this! How silly had he been to deny himself? Vimes rocked himself up and down, Nick’s prick tickling his walnut with every stroke.

Vimes grabbed his own cock and rubbed, not thinking about much of anything at all, just moving as the heat and pressure built. He rode Nick harder and faster, Nick’s hands on his hips easing around to squeeze his buttocks.

Eventually, Vimes climbed off to apply more lube. His slippery fingers felt woefully inadequate compared to the fullness that Nick’s prick provided, and he climbed back on Nick eagerly, adoring the feel of his lover deep inside himself. “Much better.”

When the sensation was too much, Vimes came, the orgasm both intense and diffuse. His seed dripped down his cock, onto his fingers and Nick’s abdomen. Nick was still hard within him, and Vimes marshalled himself to ride Nick a little longer, feeling Nick’s grip on his hips tighten and Nick buck into him quicker and deeper. Vimes tightened on Nick, tipping Nick over the edge into his own orgasm, his dick pulsing inside Vimes.

“Oh God, Sam.”

Vimes pulled off of Nick’s softening member and cuddled against him, hand on his chest and thumb flicking against one of Nick’s seams absently. Nick held him close. Vimes tucked his head under Nick’s chin, listening to the sound of Nick’s mechanisms wind down. Gods, but he felt _amazing._ After a few minutes, he reluctantly grabbed a towel from the top drawer of the nightstand to clean up.

Then they embraced some more, reveling in the intimacy. Vimes could have gone for a cigar, and he suspected Nick could have gone for a cigarette, but they didn’t smoke with children in the house. He kissed Nick, working his tongue into Nick’s mouth, feeling his tongue slide against Nick’s, tasting the ashes and -

\- well, sherry. It wasn’t Nick’s drink of choice, Vimes knew, but Nick drank it because it wasn’t Vimes’s drink of choice, either. It was Nick’s concession to Vimes’s existence as a teetotaller. When Nick did go out for something different, he did his best to swish his mouth out with a vinegar mint mouthwash before kissing Vimes. It was sweet, in an odd way. Vimes kissed him harder.

Nick’s metal hand stroked his back, sending shivers along his spine, and he speculated lazily, “Shame we’ve both got work tomorrow. Otherwise, I could screw you until you can’t stand.”

Vimes inhaled slowly, biting his lower lip. “I just have meetings. I don’t really need to be able to stand.”

Nick’s yellow eyes were amused. “Sweetheart. Why do you think I’d leave you able to sit, either?”

A certain hungry greed gripped Vimes. “I can handle another round.” He had, in the past.

Nick reached over to the nightstand and grabbed a rubber glove, sliding it on over his metal hand. His flesh hand braced at the small of his back as those metal fingers explored his arsehole. Two slipped in easily and spread, and Vimes flushed again with heat, already-present desire hooking its claws deeper into him. Nick observed, “Aren’t you just good and loose for me? Yeah, you need another dicking down, doll. This ass is begging for a nice, hard cock. But you’re just going to have to wait for these old systems to reset.”

Vimes squirmed against Nick as his husband fingered him. He was spent, dry, but he knew from previous experience, that he could come again if enough attention was paid to that sensitive little spot, oh, three inches in. Nick stroked him firmly, in a ‘come hither’ gesture, until Vimes was quite certain he was near climax again, panting and slick with sweat. Then Nick stopped. He nibbled on Vimes’s earlobe and murmured, “Not so easy as that, sweetheart. Not so easy. You can come on my cock when it’s good and ready for you.”

Vimes whined in frustration. “Nick! Come on, I’ll come again on your cock, just let me come now -” 

He reached down to touch himself, but Nick took his wrist. He chided, “Ah, ah, ah. What’s the magic word?”

“Please?” Vimes grumbled.

“I suppose, since you asked so nicely.” Nick’s metal fingers pressed back inside him, ushering Vimes towards blessed, blissful oblivion.

When coherence returned to him, Nick was still toying with him, keeping him on the mind-dribbling edge of annihilation, which was where Vimes stayed, until the discreet thought occured that he could feel Nick’s prick stiffening against his thighs, which was no place at all for it to be.

Nick kindly laid Vimes on his back and put a pillow under his hips. Then the head of his cock returned to Vimes’s arsehole, which was a much better place for it to be, but it circled and taunted without entering his willing, wet hole.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, sweet, forgiving Sybil had him, a valkyrie come to claim the living, not the slain, and then he had a night patrol with his Nick, and then he was again Sybil’s, but then… then he’d have Nick, and…

“I’m doing this to you, you tease. All of it.”

“Oh good. I was afraid I’d have to insist on it,” said Nick lightly, finally pressing in.

Vimes’s eyes rolled back, and he moaned, and he braced his hands against Nick’s shoulders. His husband screwed him good and long, until they’d both come again, all sour stickiness and ecstasy, like one of the less-discerning heavens that just might allow in Watchmen.

Vimes should have slept, then. He should have curled up with Nick and drifted off, nuzzling his neck. They had each other. They’d have other days. But it was his wedding night, for pity’s sake, and he asked Nick for a third round, and Nick obliged him, flipping him over and tying his hands behind him with the tie, not tight, with a knot that Vimes knew he could undo, though he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t going to do anything other than beseech that Nick pound him into the sheets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	24. Epilogue, or The End of the Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter song.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Epilogue, or The End of the Beginning_

Vimes teetered at the edge of his seat at breakfast, because he couldn’t sit and he couldn’t stand, and he didn’t have anyone but himself to blame. Maybe he _should_ have gone in for a honeymoon. But he’d said…

“We’d just get roped in on some mystery if we went on a honeymoon. You know that. If you’re going to be solving a mystery, you might as well be getting paid for it.”

Not that Valentine needed the money, exactly. He was prideful about not letting Vimes pay for things for him, but Vimes had refused to let his fiance, now husband, pay rent, and Valentine didn’t eat. The synthetic detective had fewer monetary concerns than most citizens of Ankh-Morpork.

“Sure, but if we got roped into a mystery on our honeymoon, I’d be solving it with you,” said Valentine, taking a drag on his morning sherry.

“We’ve a patrol together tomorrow,” Vimes reminded, staring into the bottom of his coffee cup, willing it to refill itself.

“I should hope it’s a boring one, after all this,” said Sybil.

Vimes gave a strangled little laugh.

But he had his wife and his husband and his two children, and in the city of Ankh-Morpork, he had his Watch and his friends, and it was more than any one man could dream of having.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S** : There’s plenty more for this series, just not for this fic. **Going Nuclear** and **Welcome Home** establish the setting and why there are Fallout 4 characters running around Discworld. Most later fics in the series will be a bit shorter and a bit more focused, sometimes centering on different characters, although we do still have a few monsters planned. We’re not forgetting the Disc _world_ part of our crossover: we’ve still got some exploring to do, and we hope you’ll continue to join us.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


End file.
